MIT News - Books and authors - Literature - Science writing - Writing - Knight fellowship - Journalismhttps://news.mit.edu/rss/topic/literature-writing-and-journalism%20
MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.enMon, 18 Sep 2017 14:05:01 -0400Times Higher Education names MIT No. 2 university worldwide for the arts and humanitieshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/times-higher-ed-names-mit-no-2-university-worldwide-arts-and-humanities-0918
Schools of Architecture and Planning; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and several centers are home to the arts and humanities at MIT.Mon, 18 Sep 2017 14:05:01 -0400School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/times-higher-ed-names-mit-no-2-university-worldwide-arts-and-humanities-0918<p>The Times Higher Education 2018 World University Rankings has named MIT the No. 2 university in the world for arts and humanities. The two top&nbsp;ranked universities — Stanford University and MIT — are closely aligned in the evaluation metrics, which assess the arts and humanities at research-intensive universities across core missions, including research, teaching, and international outlook.</p>
<p>The Times Higher Education World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by <em>Times Higher Education, </em>a leading British education magazine. This ranking of MIT’s global role in the arts and humanities follows other recent recognition for the Institute’s contributions to individual fields and disciplines. The 2018 QS World University rankings, for example, name MIT as the world’s top university for architecture, economics, engineering, linguistics, and natural sciences, as well as the No. 1 university in the world overall.</p>
<p>Of the <em>Times Higher Education</em> ranking, MIT President L. Rafael Reif said, “Perhaps because 'TECHNOLOGY' is carved in stone above MIT's front door, outsiders are not always prepared for the caliber of our research and education in the humanities and the arts. But it is the wisdom of the remarkable scholars in these fields, and lessons from their disciplines, that help our students develop fully into the creative citizens and inspired leaders they seek to become.”</p>
<p>“The arts and humanities are deeply embedded at MIT, throughout our schools and departments and across the curriculum,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “I am delighted to see this broad strength recognized not only for its importance to MIT but for what it offers to the world.”<br />
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Outstanding programs in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences — including linguistics, history, philosophy, music and theater arts, literature, global studies and languages, media studies, and writing — sit alongside equally strong initiatives within the School of Architecture and Planning in the visual arts, architecture, design, and history, theory, and criticism. These disciplines are complemented by the Center for Art, Society and Technology (CAST), the office of the Arts at MIT, the MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, and the MIT Museum.</p>
<p>“At MIT, we view the humanities and arts as essential for advancing knowledge, for educating young students, and for solving global issues,” said Melissa Nobles, Kenan Sahin dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “The world’s problems are so complex they’re not only scientific and technological problems. They are as much human and moral problems.”</p>
"100 percent of MIT undergraduates study the arts and humanities, joining our faculty in addressing some of the largest, most consequential human questions of our time," notes Melissa Nobles, Kenan Sahin dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.Photo: Madcoverboy/Wikimedia CommonsAwards, honors and fellowships, Rankings, Architecture, Arts, Design, Education, teaching, academics, Global Studies and Languages, History, Humanities, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Literature, Linguistics, Philosophy, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Theater, Music, SHASS, School of Architecture and PlanningThe test-free zone: An orientation guide to MIT Libraries https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-a-student-guide-to-libraries-and-resources-0908
Students can find diverse resources, helpful experts, and friendly spaces to hang out.
Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:35:01 -0400Brigham Fay | MIT Librarieshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-a-student-guide-to-libraries-and-resources-0908<p>The MIT Libraries are here to make life and learning at the Institute a little easier. They provide students with needed resources, subject-area experts who are happy to help, and friendly spaces where enjoying the quiet doesn’t have to mean being alone.</p>
<p>MIT’s five library locations —&nbsp;Barker, Dewey, Hayden, Lewis Music, and Rotch —&nbsp;are interspersed&nbsp;throughout the campus. Students are welcome in all locations, including the Institute Archives and Special Collections, which are&nbsp;home to rare and uniquely MIT items ranging from Doc Edgerton’s notebooks to William Barton Rogers’ letter about founding a new institute of technology.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“We like to think of ourselves as the guides to the whole landscape that people have here,” says Chris&nbsp;Sherratt, the librarian for atmospheric and oceanic sciences, energy and environment, and nuclear science and engineering. “When they [students] come to MIT, they have riches beyond their imagination in all the different subjects that we cover.”</p>
<p>Sherratt is one of 25 subject experts available to support students, faculty, and researchers in advancing their work on every topic&nbsp;from aeronautics to urban studies. Getting to know library staff is a smart move for anyone navigating MIT for the first time. Not only do the staff help students track down the resources they&nbsp;need in their&nbsp;area of study, they offer expert help in organizing and sharing research data and advice on fair use, open access, and other scholarly publishing issues. They can also give guidance on using geographic information systems (GIS), and more.</p>
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<p>“Library staff help but we don’t evaluate students,” says MIT Director of Libraries Chris Bourg. “This makes the libraries places where students can be especially free and comfortable asking questions, seeking help, and experimenting with new ideas.”</p>
<p>This being MIT, the libraries aren’t just places for studying; they’re also places for making. Students can borrow Equipment-To-Go kits, containing everything from heart rate sensors to soldering stations, and soon will be able to compose, mix, and edit music in a planned audio lab. Library staff also have been collaborating with students and faculty on text and data-mining projects, collecting geographic data with drones, and creating an augmented reality experience in the Lewis Music Library.</p>
<p>Sometimes getting support means taking a break. “Om Under the Dome” helps people stay grounded with 30-minute silent meditations every Monday at noon in the Barker Library Reading Room. “Furry First Fridays” are monthly study breaks where students can de-stress with therapy dogs.&nbsp;“MIT Reads” is an Institute-wide reading and discussion program open to anyone in the community. (Anyone interested can join this fall for a closer collective read of <em>Americanah</em> by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.) Novels, graphic novels, DVDs, and streaming music and video are also always on hand for those needing to recharge.</p>
<p>Students ready to get started can find all the information they need&nbsp;at&nbsp;<em>libraries.mit.edu/welcome</em>.&nbsp;</p>
MIT librarian Chris Sherratt works the stacks. She specializes in helping students find information on atmospheric and oceanic sciences, energy and environment, and nuclear science and engineering.Photo: Lillie Paquette/School of EngineeringBooks and authors, Campus services, Libraries, Staff, StudentsTalk science to me https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-eecs-communication-lab-advisors-help-students-communicate-science-0727
In the EECS Communication Lab, peer coaches provide guidance on papers, posters, presentations, and more. Thu, 27 Jul 2017 16:00:01 -0400Alison F. Takemura | Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-eecs-communication-lab-advisors-help-students-communicate-science-0727<p>In the spring of 2015, graduate students communicated&nbsp;a clear message to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS): They needed help communicating.</p>
<p>Specifically, they wanted to give better pitches for research and startup&nbsp;ideas and make presentations that wowed&nbsp;their colleagues and senior scientists. They also wanted to impress recruiters, who&nbsp;saw plenty of&nbsp;candidates with technical skills, but&nbsp;it was always the applicants with strong communication skills who really stood out from the pack.</p>
<p>Samantha Dale Strasser, a PhD candidate in EECS, says students were particularly stressed during conferences, when they realized their talks weren’t what they could be.</p>
<p>“Coming from MIT, we really want to be not only at the forefront of&nbsp;science,&nbsp;but also the forefront of communicating that science,” says Strasser, who was among the graduate students who provided the 2015 feedback.</p>
<p>In response, the department launched two initiatives: the <a href="http://mitcommlab.mit.edu/eecs/" target="_blank">EECS Communication Lab</a>, a peer-coaching resource, and a new lab-supported class, 6.S977 (Technical Communication). By all accounts, both initiatives have succeeded, resulting not only in improved pitches and posters, but in a stronger department-wide awareness of power of effective communication as well.</p>
<p>The Comm Lab, as it’s affectionately known, employs graduate students and postdocs from across EECS to serve as peer coaches. The coaches have been trained in how to&nbsp;strengthen&nbsp;their own communication skills, including how to consider their audiences and purposes, how to generate excitement about&nbsp;their research, and how to create narrative rather than litanies. As a result, the&nbsp;communication advisors are ready to provide&nbsp;one-to-one help to virtually anyone&nbsp;in the department, including undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs.</p>
<p>“The Comm Lab is a great resource,” says Priyanka Raina, a PhD candidate in EECS who&nbsp;consulted the lab for a wide range of assignments including&nbsp;a conference paper, a presentation, her resumé, and a faculty package. “It helped me a great deal. All the assignments that I worked on with the lab were accepted or saw positive results. I even got an interview with a top university.”</p>
<p>The EECS Comm Lab is the latest installment of the Communication Lab program, a School of Engineering resource. The departments of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Nuclear Science and Engineering also have their own communication labs, as does the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The model has expanded quickly because it serves students at the time when they need it most, says Jaime Goldstein, the program’s former director.</p>
<p>“Early scientists need to get funding, get a job, go to conferences, and meet&nbsp;collaborators,” she says. “We insert ourselves at just that right moment with just the right information. And peer coaches know how to ask the right questions because they're insiders in the field. It’s a real recipe for&nbsp;success.”</p>
<p>Faculty members agree. In addition to that first Technical Communication class, the Comm Lab has hosted workshops and supported other courses. In January of this year, the Comm Lab provided a training session for graduate students presenting at the Microsystems Technology Laboratories’ <a href="http://www-mtl.mit.edu/wpmu/marc2017/what-is-marc/" target="_blank">Microsystems Annual Research Conference</a>.</p>
<p>“Industry members and faculty commented that the quality of pitches showed marked improvement this year,” says Ujwal Radhakrishna, the EECS postdoc&nbsp;who organized the conference.</p>
<p>Research abstracts and presentations in 6.336 (Introduction to Numerical Simulation) have also been notably clearer than in the past, says Luca Daniel, an EECS professor who instructs&nbsp;the Comm Lab-supported class.</p>
<p>“The abstracts felt a lot better organized, with engaging motivations, detailed concise methods and results descriptions, and thoughtful considerations at the end,” Daniel says. “The presentations were also more accessible to a wider audience. My class has students from 12 different departments, so that’s essential.”</p>
<p>Daniel wasn’t the only one enthusiastic about the Comm Lab results in his course. Asked whether he should again use the resource in his course, he says his students also responded with an emphatic “yes.”&nbsp;Students also suggested adding midterm deadlines, in addition to deadlines for final abstracts and presentations, to encourage even earlier visits to the Comm Lab.</p>
<p>“They love the fact that it is other students helping them,” Daniel says.</p>
<p>Diana Chien, the current director of the school-wide Communication Lab program, understands the appeal. “In technical communication, you really can't separate the science or engineering from the communication, so our advisors are ready to tackle both at once,” she says. When EECS clients visit the Comm Lab to work on conference presentations with communication advisors, they’re really connecting with peers. The advisors&nbsp;are “as ready to parse details about the design of a machine-learning algorithm as they are to ask strategic questions about audience and storytelling,” Chien says.</p>
<p>Chien and the communication advisors also created an online resource, the <a href="http://mitcommlab.mit.edu/eecs/use-the-commkit/" target="_blank">CommKit</a>, to guide students through several common communication tasks, such as a cover letter or a National Science Foundation&nbsp;application. If an impending deadline precludes students from meeting an advisor in person, help is still just a click away.</p>
<p>The Comm Lab’s popularity is growing. Since September 2016, advisors have&nbsp;scheduled more than 300 appointments with 180-plus advisees. More than 270 students attended workshops on posters, pitches, thesis proposals, and the Research Qualifying Exam (RQE). Feedback from the Comm Lab’s first annual survey remarkably showed that of the respondents who had visited the lab, all of them would recommend it to a friend. And while many students and postdocs haven’t yet used the lab, more than three quarters of non-users surveyed indicated they were still glad that EECS offers the service.</p>
<p>School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan says the&nbsp;enthusiastic and sustained interest from students and faculty "tells us the program’s doing exceptionally well.”</p>
<p>“I expect the Comm Lab will become a staple resource in the department,” says&nbsp;Chandrakasan, who is also the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science&nbsp;and a former EECS department head.</p>
<p>Chris Foy, a PhD candidate in EECS who took the communication course and is now a peer coach, says skills taught in the Comm Lab have a clear professional impact. He ranks the Technical Communication class as one of his favorites at MIT, in part because it taught him how to focus on building a rationale or a narrative about his research.</p>
<p>“Being able to do this is crucial&nbsp;as a scientist because there are so many problems that are, in theory, worth solving,” he says. “But if you can’t construct a story around why you chose this problem,” he adds pointedly, “then why are you solving it?”</p>
<p>Joel Jean PhD '17, who received a doctorate in electrical engineering in May, credits his communication-advisor training with helping him clearly explain his vision for working on thin-film solar cells to help address climate change. That effort paid off: Jean won one of MIT’s most prestigious graduate awards, the Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship.</p>
<p>“My return on investment from working with the EECS Comm Lab as an advisor has been extraordinarily high,” he says. “And I expect its value, both for me and for students in the department, to keep growing.”</p>
Graduate students Samantha Dale Strasser and Greg Stein are among the trained advisors working in the EECS Communication Lab. Photo: Alison TakemuraClasses and programs, Science writing, Graduate, postdoctoral, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), School of Engineering, Science communications, STEM education, Education, teaching, academicsDavid Gordon Wilson&#039;s lifelong love of the bicycle https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-bike-bible-david-gordon-wilson-on-bicycles-0725
MIT emeritus professor, designer, and inventor, is set to release the fourth edition of his popular book, &quot;Bicycling Science,&quot; known as the &quot;bike bible.&quot;Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:00:01 -0400Mary Beth O'Leary | Department of Mechanical Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-bike-bible-david-gordon-wilson-on-bicycles-0725<p><em>For </em><em>David Gordon Wilson, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering, there is only one way to get to work —&nbsp;on his beloved bike. Cycling has been his preferred mode of transportation since he first rode on two wheels at the age of nine in his native England. His passion for the bicycle helped inspire his decision to pursue a career in engineering.</em></p>
<p><em>Over the course of six decades, Wilson’s career has been peppered with many achievements, including&nbsp;</em><em>inventing the&nbsp;</em><em>fee-plus-rebate progressive energy tax policy and&nbsp;</em><em>designing jet engines</em><em>. But wherever his career has taken him, his hobby of cycling has followed. Wilson&nbsp;was recently invited to work on a fourth edition of “Bicycling Science,”</em><em>&nbsp;which is not only the MIT Press' best-selling book but also regarded as the premiere authority on bicycle design. He spoke recently with the Department of Mechanical Engineering on his lifelong love.</em></p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>When did your passion for the bicycle turn into an academic pursuit?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>In 1967, I organized an international competition&nbsp;in collaboration with the journal <em>Engineering&nbsp;</em>for the best design in human-powered land transport. To my amazement, 78 people from 64&nbsp;countries entered, and it was a great success. At the time I was passionate about getting people interested in different types of bikes, particularly recumbent bicycles. So as the competition carried on, I worked on my own designs for a recumbent bicycle.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What made you interested in designing recumbent bicycles over traditional upright bicycles?</p>
<p><strong>A:&nbsp;</strong>Well, recumbents are faster and safer than regular bikes. Cycling in a reclined position also helps distribute weight more evenly, giving better and safer braking with no danger of going over the handlebars. In the 1970s, I started designing recumbents after [Berkeley, California inventor] Fred Willkie asked for designs. This culminated in the Wilson-Willkie Recumbent in 1975. Our bike became extremely popular in Europe and got some great visibility when it was featured by Mobil for its “Imagination”&nbsp;series [of television commercials].</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>One of the recumbent bicycles you designed broke the world record for speed. How did you go about designing a recumbent for speed?</p>
<p><strong>A:&nbsp;</strong>It was important to make the bicycle more aerodynamic to achieve top speeds. In the late '70s, the Fomac&nbsp;corporation built the Avatar 1000 and Avatar 2000 recumbent bicycles to my designs. The Avatar 2000 was then streamlined in 1982&nbsp;with a lightweight fairing called Bluebell to make the bike more aerodynamic. That same year, ridden by an Australian lawyer, it broke the world record at the International Human Powered Vehicle Association trials by traveling 51.9 miles per hour. That record has increased greatly in recent years using the flat Highway 305 at an altitude of 4,511 feet in Battle Mountain, Nevada.&nbsp;In 2013, a team from the Netherlands achieved 83.1 miles per hour.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What do you think has been the biggest advance in bicycle design since publishing the first edition of “Bicycling Science”<em>&nbsp;</em>in 1974?</p>
<p><strong>A:&nbsp;</strong>Advances in brake and transmission designs have really improved cycling. Gears have a far wider range than had the old three-speeds and ten-speeds. My wife actually rode 4,000 miles across the country last summer. She also works for the visiting nurses and cycles to her patients, often carrying large loads using a 14-speed hub gear that has a gear range over 500 percent. Another development that has made a big difference in modern bikes is the use of carbon fiber. It makes the structure lighter and stiffer than the steel, aluminum, or titanium used for most bikes. One of my students, David Kindler, made the first fiber wheel for bicycles.</p>
<p><strong>Q:&nbsp;</strong>What do you see as the next big thing in bicycle design?</p>
<p><strong>A:&nbsp;</strong>Somebody sent me a wonderful video about the launch of a self-driving bicycle. Of course they sent it on April 1, so it ended up being an April Fool’s joke. What I would really like to see is for companies to make bikes safer. If any element of the design fails,&nbsp;for example a fork or chainstay breaks,&nbsp;then the cyclist is put in danger. It’s crucial to make safe, lightweight bicycles, especially in sports. The Dutch have taken the leadership in producing enclosed or semi-enclosed cycles called “velomobiles,” giving enhanced safety and weather protection.</p>
<p><strong>Q:&nbsp;</strong>Do you see a place for recumbent bicycles in professional cycling?</p>
<p><strong>A:&nbsp;</strong>Absolutely! Something I’ve recommended is for the Tour de France to have recumbents start prior to the regular upright bicycles. It would be very exciting to add this element, since recumbents are not only faster, but safer, so you wouldn’t see the domino-style pile-ups that often occur in the Tour de France.</p>
"Something I’ve recommended is for the Tour de France to have [recumbent bicycles] start prior to the regular upright bicycles," says Professor Emeritus David Gordon Wilson. "It would be very exciting to add this element, since recumbents are not only faster, but safer, so you wouldn’t see the domino-style pile-ups that often occur."Photo courtesy of the Department of Mechanical EngineeringSchool of Engineering, Design, Faculty, Sustainability, Transportation, Books and authors, MIT Press, Mechanical engineering, Carbon, Sports and fitnessA.R. Gurney, acclaimed playwright, author, and longtime MIT professor, dies at 86https://news.mit.edu/2017/ar-pete-gurney-acclaimed-playwright-and-author-dies-0712
An MIT humanities and literature faculty member for 36 years, Gurney was known as an outstanding teacher and inspiring mentor.Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:40:01 -0400School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/ar-pete-gurney-acclaimed-playwright-and-author-dies-0712<p>A.R. "Pete" Gurney Jr., an internationally acclaimed playwright and author who served on the MIT faculty for 36 years, died June 13 at his home in New York City. He was 86.</p>
<p>The author of such well-known plays as “The Middle Ages,” “The Dining Room,” and “The Cocktail Hour,” Gurney was named a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play "Love Letters." His Broadway debut, in 1987, was with "Sweet Sue" starring Mary Tyler Moore. He was also the author of three novels. A <a href="http://argurney.com/index.html" target="_blank">complete list of Gurney's works</a> is available on his website.<br />
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Gurney joined the faculty of the Department of Humanities — a predecessor to the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) — in 1960. He earned tenure in 1968, was promoted to full professor in 1972, and retired in 1996, moving to New York City to focus more completely on the theater.<br />
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In 1994, MIT honored Gurney with the <a href="https://arts.mit.edu/events-visit/mcdermott/about/" target="_blank">McDermott Award</a> for his contribution to the arts. Among many other honors and awards, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.<br />
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Deborah Fitzgerald, the Cutten Professor of the History of Technology, and a former dean of SHASS, recalls Gurney as a "legend at the Institute. We have had many enormously distinguished faculty in SHASS over the years," she said, "and he was one of the most remarkable from the humanities and arts."<br />
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"Gurney was a wonderful mentor to young faculty in the MIT Humanities and an outstanding teacher," says Philip Khoury, associate provost and the Ford International Professor of History. "His many students continue to remember him with fondness and appreciation. One of America’s leading playwrights, Pete Gurney was forever conscious of what MIT meant for his professional career. And he contributed enormously to making the MIT humanities so vital.”<br />
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"I remember Gurney sitting in on an American literature class when I was an undergraduate at MIT," recalls Duane Boning, now the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "He wasn't the lecturer — Gurney was there out of love for the subject, and to hear what young students were thinking about these books. I thought that was pretty cool. Even when he wasn't teaching, he was inspiring."<br />
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In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/theater/playwright-a-r-gurney-dead.html" target="_blank">an extensive tribute</a> to the life and works of A.R. Gurney, <em>The New York Times</em> reports on the driving force of his writing: “'What seems to obsess me,' he once said, 'is the contrast between the world and the values I was immersed in when I was young, and the nature of the contemporary world.' Early on, he said, 'I sensed the comforts of civilization — but also its discontents, what you give up. The emotions are carefully trained, ultimately honed, tamped down.' He devoted his life to bringing those feelings to the surface."</p>
<h5><em>Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications<br />
Editorial Director: Emily Hiestand<br />
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill </em></h5>
Longtime MIT professor of humanities A.R. "Pete" GurneyFaculty, Books and authors, Literature, Theater, Humanities, Obituaries, Arts, SHASSQ&amp;A: Running a company in an era of “crazy technological progress”https://news.mit.edu/2017/qa-mcafee-brynjolfsson-running-company-technological-progress-0627
New book by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson surveys tech’s challenges for business.Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/qa-mcafee-brynjolfsson-running-company-technological-progress-0627<p><em>How do ongoing advances in technology affect business management? That’s the question the prolific writing duo of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pose in their new book, “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future,” being published on June 27 by W.W. Norton. Brynjolfsson, the </em><em>Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director </em><em>of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan, also </em><em>collaborated in 2014 on “The Second Machine Age,” another exploration of the changes digital innovation is bringing to the workplace.</em><em> McAfee recently talked to </em>MIT News<em> about </em><em>“Machine, Platform, Crowd.” </em></p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What is your new book about?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> “Machine, Platform, Crowd” is the answer to a question: How should I think differently about running my organization in this era of crazy technological progress? We need to rethink the balance between the work that we ask human minds to do in organizations, and the work we give to machines. We need to rethink whether you have a product orientation or a platform orientation. And we need to rethink the core of an organization, if there are literally these hundreds of millions of strangers out there across the internet who you can tap into.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What’s different now compared to past moments of technological change?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> Within the past five years, 10 years easily, at least two really fundamental things have happened. First of all, artifical intelligence started meeting its expectations and even exceeding them. We weren’t expecting that, and it’s pretty remarkable. The machines are much more capable. The second thing is, in the era of the smartphone, we have gone from a globe that was pretty disconnected, to having that same human population for the first time deeply interconnected through powerful devices, which are each about as powerful as all the computers collectively on campus when I was an undergraduate at MIT in the ’80s. Those are both legitimately new things.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> I know you’ve mentioned the rise of machines that can win at the game of Go as one instance of these advances. What are some of your favorite examples of machines, platforms, and crowds at work now?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> Go is my favorite example of the power of machines, because it was so unanticipated that we would have a digital Go champion in 2016 or 2017. The insiders thought if that ever happened it would happen much, much farther out in the future.</p>
<p>In our section on products and platforms, we talk about companies like ClassPass, which is trying to build a purely digital platform; they don’t own any assets, but they’re trying to provide a virtual, very broad gym membership, or exercise membership [by offering rates for an array of memberships]. So they’re putting a platform over the industry of spinning, yoga, pilates, kickboxing, things like that. And if you had asked me just a little while ago for an industry that would not be greatly affected by the digital transformation, I might have said group exercise: You get in the gym with other people and sweat and have a workout. But after working on the book, I think that the exercise industry is going to be changed a lot by platforms.</p>
<p>Finally, we came across a very interesting company called Quantopian that is trying to be essentially a crowdsourced quantitative trading hedge fund. That may sound ludicrous, except, as the founder of the company has said, it is extremely unlikely that all the world’s top algorithmic traders are employed by the [relative] handful of companies that have dominated this industry. So to test that theory, they’ve been holding contests for algorithmic trading. It turns out, lo and behold, most of the people who win those contests are not insiders in the finance industry and have never even worked in finance. It tells me that if you can tap into the crowd and find the right brains, all over the world, and get them involved in what you’re doing, the results are potentially tremendous.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What’s the reaction to these ideas when you give talks about them?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> The reception to these ideas is all over the map. It goes from outright skepticism to something a little more subtle, which is, “This is great and interesting, but it doesn’t apply to me.” I’ve come across a lot of that.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Do you get pushback about your interpretation of the pace of innovation itself?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> Yeah, it’s super-interesting. Inside the academic community and among economists there is a huge debate about how much innovation we’re actually seeing. The skeptics say, “Where is the productivity growth, if there’s so much innovation going on?” Or they say, “We had amazing periods of innovation in the past. Are we sure this one measures up?” And those are important debates to have. But in every other community I try to be part of, and that includes investors, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and executives in mainstream incumbent companies, I don’t hear any of that debate, or very little. What I hear instead is: “There’s a lot coming at us, and we need to get on top of it and make it work for us.”</p>
<p>When people say there’s nothing new under the sun, I find that really valuable, because if all you do is talk to technologists, you just get caught up in the hype. It’s almost inevitable. So I really value those discussions. But when I talk to almost anybody else, it’s something close to a foregone conclusion that we’re living in this remarkable era, and I happen to believe that as well. Not only can we sequence the genome, we can edit it with precision. If that’s not a big deal, then I don’t [know what is]. We only mention CRISPR briefly in the book, but the period that we’re in is one to me of monumental progress and innovation.</p>
“Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,” by Andrew McAfee (top) and Erik Brynjolfsson, published by W.W. Norton.
Books and authors, Faculty, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Artificial intelligence, Technology and society, Sloan School of Management, Robotics, Business and management, Crowdsourcing, Jobs, EconomicsIs the Pax Americana truly peaceful? https://news.mit.edu/2017/john-dower-book-pax-americana-truly-peaceful-0627
MIT historian John Dower’s latest book decries the militarism of the postwar years.Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/john-dower-book-pax-americana-truly-peaceful-0627<p>As a series of widely publicized statistics compiled by scholars suggests, warfare and violence have declined dramatically over the last seven decades — constituting a period that historian John Gaddis once termed “the long peace.” Rarely, it seems, have most people been able to live lives of such normalcy. Who would argue with the state of affairs that has produced such results?</p>
<p>John Dower would, for one.</p>
<p>Dower is the Ford International Professor of History, Emeritus, and has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as part of a career spent writing about topics such as the extreme brutality of World War II combat and the reconstruction of postwar Japan. Today, when he looks at matters of war and security, Dower is skeptical that we have made much progress since then.</p>
<p>“We’re in a perpetual cycle of violence in the name of preventing violence,” Dower says.</p>
<p>Now in Dower’s latest book, “The Violent American Century,” published this spring by Haymarket Books, he questions the foundation of the entire postwar order. As Dower sees it, there may be less warfare today, but our apparent U.S.-led calm is heavily based on a hyperactive militarism. And the vast superiority of American armed forces creates an inherent volatility, Dower thinks, because the U.S. expects to bend international affairs to its will, by virtue of sheer strength.</p>
<p>As such, Dower contends, the U.S. has mistakenly pursued an open-ended “war on terror,” supported too many proxy wars, and risked nuclear annihilation. Our postwar era of relative peace thus hinges in part on good fortune — in avoiding some accidental triggers of nuclear war, for instance — and may be more short-lived than some of us assume.</p>
<p>“The sense that we must always have a dominant military posture means we must always be pushing the frontiers of military technology,” Dower observes. “But that means we are always pushing the edge of greater and greater destructiveness.”</p>
<p><strong>New kinds of war </strong></p>
<p>Dower’s book is a reference to the famous phrase used by <em>TIME</em> magazine founder Henry Luce, who wrote in a 1941 anti-isolationism essay that we were living in “The American Century.”</p>
<p>Dower does acknowledge that, by the basic numbers — compiled by many scholars and research groups such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, at Uppsala University in Sweden — we have been safer over the last 70-plus years. On the other hand, Dower adds, the end of World War II would make almost any security regime seem tranquil by contrast. At least 50 million people were killed in World War II, by most estimates; The Correlates of War Project, an academic research inquiry, estimates that over 2 million battle deaths have occurred in almost every decade since then.</p>
<p>“If you go back to World War II, when anywhere between 50 million to 80 million people were killed, of course we're not killing those numbers [of people] now,” says Dower, who also suggests such estimates are inherently imprecise.</p>
<p>The core of Dower’s critique concerns three types of U.S. military activity: proxy wars, the “war on terror,” and the buildup of its nuclear arsenal. In each case, Dower contends, U.S. activity has not simply had deterrent effects; it has also escalated violence or, in the case of the nuclear arms race, the potential consequences of warfare.</p>
<p>In the case of the Cold War-era proxy wars the U.S. led or backed, Dower contends in the book that those campaigns led to “unrestrained devastation” and the “unleashing of massive brute force” that we may still downplay. As he points out, during the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped about 40 times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than it dropped on Japan in World War II.</p>
<p>The U.S. decision to respond to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Dower thinks, led to a wide-ranging “war on terror” that constitutes a “new kind of war” that has proven to be hydra-headed and has underestimated the political and military resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East.</p>
<p>“When we went into Iraq, with the ‘cakewalk’ rhetoric, with that came a real hubris and failure to look at human nature,” Dower says.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the development of nuclear arsenals, Dower observes, is potentially more lethal than anything else people have ever attempted. In the book, he notes both nuclear near-misses and the tendency of some military planners to regard nuclear weapons as “simply the high end of conventional weaponry” when they clearly are in a category by themselves.</p>
<p>“The nuclear arms race is terrifying,” Dower says. “It's a kind of terror, but built into that postwar system.”</p>
<p>All of this, Dower argues, should give people pause about an international edifice that rests so squarely on militarism. But, as he writes in the book, “The myth of exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its thrall.”</p>
<p><strong>Personally pessimistic</strong></p>
<p>To be sure, there are other perspectives on the post-World War II order that give more relative credit to the U.S., and especially its application of “soft power,” the web of diplomatic and economic relationships that help bind other countries in largely peaceful international relationships.</p>
<p>Still other scholarship emphasizes the role of the U.N., the European Union, NATO, and other oragnizations, in reducing intra-European warfare.</p>
<p>However, numerous prominent scholars find Dower’s new contribution to be valuable. Andrew Bacevich, a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and a leading commentator on American security strategy, calls Dower’s new book a “timely, compact, and utterly compelling exposé of the myriad contradictions besetting U.S. national security policy.”</p>
<p>Dower says his own experiences as a citizen have forged an intellectual habit of not giving his own country, however much he admires it in general, a free pass on security policy.</p>
<p>“I'm of the generation that was a young adult during the Vietnam war,” Dower explains. “The fire of those years burned a certain impression and way of thinking upon us, and that has influenced me in thinking about violence.”</p>
<p>That legacy, as well as the multitude of U.S. military engagements at the moment, Dower adds, leaves him skeptical that a new security paradigm will emerge any time soon.</p>
<p>“I’m very pessimistic at the moment,” Dower concludes.</p>
“The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,” by John W Dower (Haymarket Books)SHASS, History, International relations, Books and authors, Humanities, Security studies and military, Nuclear security and policy, FacultyMIT Press teams with Internet Archive and Arcadia to provide access to hundreds of backlist titleshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-press-teams-with-internet-archive-arcadia-to-digitize-hundreds-of-backlist-titles-0530
Press&#039; first major digitization endeavor ushers in a new era of access.Tue, 30 May 2017 17:15:01 -0400MIT Presshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-press-teams-with-internet-archive-arcadia-to-digitize-hundreds-of-backlist-titles-0530<p>The MIT Press and the <a href="https://archive.org/index.php" target="_blank">Internet Archive</a> have announced a partnership,<em> </em>with support from <a href="https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk" target="_blank">Arcadia</a>, to scan, preserve, and enable libraries to lend hundreds of MIT Press books that are currently not available digitally. This partnership represents an important advance in bringing acclaimed titles across the MIT Press’ publications in science, technology, art, and architecture to a global online audience. &nbsp;</p>
<p>The joint initiative is a crucial early step in Internet Archive’s ambitious plans to digitize and provide public access to 4 million books, by partnering widely with university presses and other publishers to source print works, and enable readers to borrow the digital versions from any library that owns the physical book, as well as from <a href="http://archive.org" target="_blank">archive.org</a>. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“These books represent some of the finest scholarship ever produced, but right now online learners cannot unlock this knowledge,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “Together with the MIT Press, we will enable the patrons of every library that owns these books to have a choice. They can read the physical book or the electronic version of these important texts.” &nbsp;</p>
<p>The Internet Archive is one of eight groups named semi-finalists in <a href="http://www.macfound.org/programs/100change/" target="_blank">100&amp;Change</a><em>, </em>a global competition for a single $100 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The competition seeks bold solutions to critical problems of our time. The partnership with MIT Press is part of an ambitious plan to create more universal and equitable access to knowledge worldwide, bringing some of the most important books of the 20th century to scholars, journalists, students, and the print disabled.</p>
<p>MIT Press Director&nbsp;Amy Brand says, “One of my top ambitions for the MIT Press since becoming director just two years ago has been to ensure that our entire legacy of publications is digitized, accessible, searchable, discoverable now and in perpetuity. Partnering with Internet Archive to achieve this objective is a dream come true not only for me and my colleagues at the press, but also for many of our authors whose earlier works are completely unavailable or not easily accessible.” &nbsp;</p>
<p>“Lending online permits libraries to fulfill their mission in the digital age, allowing anyone in the world to borrow through the ether copies of works they own,” said Peter Baldwin, co-founder of Arcadia and professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. “The IA-MIT collaboration is a big step in the direction of realizing a universal library, accessible to anyone, anywhere.”</p>
<p>The MIT Press-Internet Archive partnership is the MIT Press’ first major digitization endeavor. It ushers in a new era of access for readers who value the press’ distinctive position as a university press that honors real world complexity by publishing interdisciplinary scholarship that crosses traditional boundaries.</p>
<p>An initial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles will be scanned at Internet Archive’s Boston Public Library facility, including Cyril Stanley Smith’s 1980 book, "From Art to Science: Seventy-Two Objects Illustrating the Nature of Discovery," and Frederick Law Olmsted&nbsp;and Theodora Kimball’s "Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park," which was published in 1973.<em> </em>The oldest title in the group is Arthur C. Hardy’s 1936<em> </em>"Handbook of Colorimetry."</p>
<p>John Palfrey, head of school at Phillips Academy Andover and well-known public access advocate, described the partnership as “a truly ground-breaking development in open scholarship that I hope will inspire other university presses to follow suit, since so many excellent and important books are effectively out of circulation by virtue of being analog-only in a digital world.”</p>
<p>The Internet Archive has already begun digitizing MIT Press’ backlist and anticipates lending copies as early as next month. The set of 1,500 deep backlist works should be available by the end of 2017.</p>
MIT Press is known for publishing interdisciplinary scholarship that crosses traditional boundaries. The Internet Archive has begun digitizing MIT Press’ backlist; 1,500 deep backlist works should be available by the end of 2017. Photo: MIT PressMIT Press, Digital humanities, Open access, Books and authors, Collaboration3Q: Siqi Zheng on air quality and urban development in Chinahttps://news.mit.edu/2017/3q-siqi-zheng-on-air-quality-and-urban-development-in-china-0519
Author of “Blue Skies over Beijing” links Chinese air quality and urban development.Fri, 19 May 2017 15:20:01 -0400Joanne Wong | School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2017/3q-siqi-zheng-on-air-quality-and-urban-development-in-china-0519<p><em>MIT Professor Siqi Zheng is the Samuel Tak Lee Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and Entrepreneurship within MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Center for Real Estate. She is also faculty director of the MIT Samuel Tak Lee Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab and author, with Matthew E. Kahn, of "<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10701.html" target="_blank">Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China</a>" (Princeton University Press, 2016). The book takes a microeconomic perspective on how pollution affects Chinese cities, and it recently won an honorable mention in the category of environmental science at the 2017 PROSE Awards, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers.</em></p>
<p><em>Zheng holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Tsinghua University, where she also earned a PhD in urban economics and real estate and taught for 10 years after doing postdoctoral work at Harvard University. On her approach to research, she says, “I realized that just studying the housing market is a bit narrow, and we need to understand housing from the urban perspective. People come to the city for good jobs, or amenities like schools, health care, museums, and other public services. In cities with cleaner air or in areas with big parks, housing prices tend to be higher, all else being equal. That was my starting point to look at environmental topics.” Zheng spoke with the School of Architecture and Planning about "Blue Skies" and today's environmental and economic realities in China.</em></p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Your book uses stories about individuals to demonstrate the impact of pollution on the urban population in China. Why did you and your coauthor use this as a technique to understand advances in sustainable development and environmental planning?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>My coauthor and I have written many papers together, published in academic journals. When we decided to write a book, we wanted to generate impact not only for academics but also for policy makers and the general public. That’s why we chose to use individual stories. The basic logic of the book builds on our papers, but we don’t have regression tables in there. We want Chinese policy makers to read this and change their minds. I also rewrote this book in Chinese and it generated some impact.</p>
<p>We also considered the readers here in the United States. Many Americans only hear about carbon emissions from China and how that will have negative impact for the United States, but they don’t care about local pollution in China because it has nothing to do with them. We want to change that thinking. We can’t only care about global-scale climate change; we also need to consider the local quality of life because these two things are closely related. If you want to know more about China’s future, you need to understand its local life.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>The debate between economic growth and sustainable development is a contested one here in the United States and in China as well. What do you think is a good way for us to think about these seemingly incompatible priorities and how to reconcile them?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>There are two ways to think of this. One way is spatial. There is a huge variation in economic growth among Chinese cities, with rich ones on the coast and poor ones inland. Richer cities now have reached a stage where they care more about the environment because they are transitioning from the old manufacturing-dominated model to new, human-capital-driven economic growth. They need to improve quality of life in the whole city to attract highly skilled workers.</p>
<p>Cleaning the air is not throwing money away; it’s actually an investment to generate a return through the arrival of new human capital and its contribution to the economy. Poor cities, however, have no choice. They still need those dirty factories for tax revenue and GDP growth. They have to receive the incoming dirty factories that may be driven out of rich cities. That is the spatial perspective, and it may be one cause of inequality.</p>
<p>The other perspective is temporal. When China has high economic growth and everything is booming, the central government really wants to push local governments to go green and regulate the dirty industries. But when there is a downturn in the macro economy, they become hesitant because they still need those heavy industries to generate jobs. It’s like a policy cycle. Now that we are in economic decline, the central and local governments are once again investing a lot in the manufacturing sector, and you will observe that air quality in some cities has started to worsen again.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>The rising Chinese middle class wants a lifestyle similar to that of the middle class in other developed countries, but they are being told that they cannot have the material things that others may take for granted, because of environmental concerns. Does that makes it difficult for the environmental cause?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> We need to acknowledge the reality that China is very big, and major Chinese cities have extremely high density. And with rising income, private car ownership has experienced a sharp increase in China, so in Beijing and Shanghai there are driving restrictions and license auctions.</p>
<p>Urban planners need to consider how to reconcile people’s demand for better quality of life with &nbsp;other constraints. Environmental constraints are one, land constraints are another. We cannot convert all farm land to urban use. That’s a special challenge for urban planners in China. We need to make more trade-offs between people’s private demand and ways to mitigate the negative externalities they create.</p>
<p>Let me give you three examples from the transportation sector. If we build enough public transit—especially a subway system—that would encourage people to use the subway instead of driving. In my research, I found that when a subway station opens, nearby households do increase their subway rideshare, at the expense of driving. Our suggestion for planners is to change the zoning in areas close to subway stops to increase residential density, so that those areas can accommodate more housing units.</p>
<p>Another of my papers demonstrates that high-income and low-income people actually have a similar willingness to pay for a square meter of housing in those good locations around subway stations. But because the size of those houses is large, low-income households cannot afford to live there. But if you build small units in high density in those places, it will help lower-income people afford those units and have a convenient commute.</p>
<p>The third example is about traffic management. Current urban traffic management in China is inadequate, meaning that given the same number of cars, Chinese cities experience more congestion than, for example, Tokyo. If we have more efficient traffic management, we can effectively reduce congestion and other negative externalities, with the same number of cars on the road. We cannot just restrict cars without considering our management skills and people’s driving habits.&nbsp;</p>
"We can’t only care about global-scale climate change; we also need to consider the local quality of life because these two things are closely related. If you want to know more about China’s future, you need to understand its local life," says Siqi Zheng, faculty director of the Samuel Tak Lee MIT Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab.Photo: Tom Gearty3 Questions, Faculty, Books and authors, China, Urban studies and planning, Center for Real Estate, STL Lab, Real estate, Housing, Economics, Environment, Pollution, School of Architecture and PlanningDarwin visits Wall Streethttps://news.mit.edu/2017/andrew-lo-book-financial-markets-evolutionary-lines-0518
Andrew Lo’s new book urges a rethink of financial markets, along evolutionary lines.Wed, 17 May 2017 23:59:59 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/andrew-lo-book-financial-markets-evolutionary-lines-0518<p>If you have money in the stock market, then you are probably anticipating a profit over the long term — a rational expectation given that stocks have historically performed well. But when stocks plunge, even for one day, you may also feel some fear and want to dump all those stress-creating equities.</p>
<p>There is a good reason for this: You’re human.</p>
<p>And that means, to generalize, that you have both a rational side and some normal human emotions. To Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, accepting this basic point means we should also rethink some common ideas about how markets work.</p>
<p>In economics and finance, after all, there is a long tradition of thinking about investors as profit-maximizing rational actors, while imagining that markets operate near a state of perfect efficiency. That sounds nice in theory. But evidence shows that this view is not sufficient for understanding the radical swings that market sentiment creates. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“When you and I are making investment decisions independently, we’ll exhibit different behavior,” Lo says. Those varied decisions help keep markets stable, most of the time. “But when we all feel threatened at the same time, we’re likely to react in the same way. And if we all start selling stocks at once, we get a market crash and panic. Fear can overwhelm rationality.”</p>
<p>Now Lo has written a new book about the subject, “<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10932.html">Adaptive Markets</a>,” published this month by Princeton University Press. In the book, he draws on insights from evolutionary theory, psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to paint a new picture of investors. Instead of regarding investors simply as either rational or irrational, Lo explains how their behavior may be “maladaptive” — unsuited to the rapidly changing environments that shifting markets present.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>In so doing, Lo would like to resolve the divergence between the realities of human behavior and the long-standing “efficient markets hypothesis” (EMH) of finance with his own “adaptive markets hypothesis,” to account for the dynamics of markets — and to provide new regulatory mechanisms to better ward off damaging crashes.</p>
<p>“It takes a theory to beat a theory,” Lo quips, “and behavioralists haven’t yet put forward a theory of human behavior.”</p>
<p><strong>Path-dependent</strong></p>
<p>To get a grip on Lo’s thinking, briefly examine both sides of the EMH debate. On the one hand, markets do exhibit significant efficiencies. Do you own a mutual fund that tracks a major stock-market index? That’s because it is very hard for individual investors or fund managers to beat indexes over an extended period of time. On the other hand, based on what we know about market swings and investor behavior, it seems a stretch to think markets are always efficient.</p>
<p>“The EMH is a very powerful theory that has added a great deal of value to investors, portfolio managers, and regulators,” Lo says. “I don’t want to be viewed as criticizing it. What I’m hoping to do is to expand its reach, by explaining under which conditions it’s likely to work well, and under which other conditions we require a different approach.”</p>
<p>As Lo notes in the book, the EMH assumes that individuals always maximize their expected utility — they find the optimal way to spend and invest, all the time. Lo’s adaptive markets hypothesis relaxes this dictum on two counts. First, a successful investing adaptation doesn’t have to be the best of all possible adaptations — it just has to work fairly well at a given time.</p>
<p>And second, Lo’s adaptive markets hypothesis does not hold that people will constantly be finding the best possible investments. Instead, as he writes in the book, “consumer behavior is highly path-dependent,” based on what has worked well in the past.</p>
<p>Given those conditions, the market equivalent of natural selection weeds out poor investment strategies, Lo writes, and “ensures that consumer behavior is, while not necessarily optimal or ‘rational,’ good enough.” Not perfect, but decent.</p>
<p>In this light, consider fund managers who do beat the big stock indexes for a while. In many cases, their successes are followed by years of poor performance. Why? Because they did not keep adapting to a changing investing environment. This familiar dynamic, Lo contends, is one reason we should drop the physics-inspired notions of the market as an efficient mechanism, and think of it in evolutionary terms.</p>
<p>Or, as Lo writes in the book, “biology is a closer fit to economics than physics.” As the physicist Richard Feynman put it, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”</p>
<p><strong>Looking for policy impact</strong></p>
<p>“Adaptive Markets” does not represent the first time Lo has put some of these ideas into print. It is the culmination of a long-term line of inquiry, and the most detailed, extended treatment he has given to the concept.</p>
<p>The book is written for a general audience but has received a wide hearing in academia. Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, an economist at Princeton University, calls “Adaptive Markets” a “wonderful book” that “presents many valuable findings” and “is itself a manifestation of the important finding that rational thinking and emotion go together.”</p>
<p>Lo says his hope for the book, however, is not just to change some minds among the public and other scholars, but to reach policymakers. Having served on multiple government advisory panels about regulation, Lo believes we need regulations that are more generally focused on limiting risk and large-scale crashes, rather than seeking to assess the legitimacy of umpteen new financial instruments.</p>
<p>The analogy Lo likes to make is that finance needs an equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates the systemic causes of aviation accidents, among other things, and whose existence has helped engender a period of unprecedented air safety.</p>
<p>Even in the run-up to the 2008 financial-sector crisis, Lo contends, the notorious bond markets trading securities backed by subprime mortgages, and their derivatives, were not deeply “irrational.” After all, those markets had winners as well as losers; the problems included the way the markets were constructed and the opportunity for firms to wildly increase their risks while seeking big payoffs.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“It’s not so much that market prices were wrong, it’s that the policies and incentives were flawed,” Lo contends.</p>
<p>That might generate some heated debate, but Lo says it is a discussion he welcomes.</p>
<p>“We aren’t really getting traction arguing either for or against efficient markets,” Lo says. “So maybe it’s time for a new perspective.”</p>
“Adaptive Markets,” by Andrew Lo, published by Princeton University Press
Photo: Jason DorfmanBusiness and management, Economics, Behavior, Evolution, Behavioral economics, Finance, Government, Books and authors, Faculty, Research, Sloan School of ManagementKnight Science Journalism Program at MIT announces 2017-18 class of fellowshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/knight-science-journalism-program-at-mit-announces-2017-18-fellows-0504
Ten elite science journalists from four countries will be part of the program&#039;s 35th class.Thu, 04 May 2017 12:10:01 -0400Knight Science Journalism Program at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2017/knight-science-journalism-program-at-mit-announces-2017-18-fellows-0504<p>The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that 10 elite science journalists from four countries have been selected as fellows for the 2017-18 academic year. The KSJ@MIT fellow program, entering its 35th year, brings a selection of the world’s finest journalists to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an academic year of study, intellectual growth, and exploration at MIT, Harvard University, and other institutions in greater Boston.</p>
<p>KSJ@MIT, supported by a generous endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists and as publisher of the award-winning magazine, <em><a href="http://undark.org/" target="_blank">Undark</a>. </em>Since its founding in 1983, it has hosted more than 300 fellows representing media outlets ranging from <em>The New York Times</em> to <em>Le Monde,</em> CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.</p>
<p>With support from the program, fellows pursue an academic year of independent study, augmented by twice-weekly science-focused seminars taught by some of the world’s leading scientists and storytellers, as well as a variety of rotating, skills-focused master classes and workshops. The goal: fostering real professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encouraging them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest. &nbsp;</p>
<p>The 2017-18 class of KSJ fellows:&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Teresa Carr</strong> is a senior content editor for <em>Consumer Reports</em> and an award-winning investigative reporter. Her stories focus on consumer and public health issues; recently she has been investigating the pharmaceutical industry with a particular emphasis on the costs of pain management and addiction. Last year, she received the Folio Award for her articles on American’s antibiotic crisis and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Magazine Journalism.</p>
<p><strong>Caty Enders</strong> is the series editor for <em>The Guardian's</em> U.S. edition, based in New York, where she edits features, analysis, and multimedia projects on the environment, health, and technology. She has been the supervising producer for <em>The Guardian’s</em> recently launched U.S. podcast program. She previously worked as managing online editor for <em>Outside</em> magazine and as a freelance radio producer and writer for outlets ranging from “All Things Considered” to <em>Esquire.</em></p>
<p><strong>Sujata Gupta</strong> is a freelance journalist based in Vermont, whose writing focuses on issues related to food, ecology, and health. Her work has been featured in <em>The New Yorker,</em> National Public Radio, <em>Nature, High Country News, Discover, Scientific American, Wired, </em>and <em>NovaNext.</em> She has taught journalism at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Previously, she worked as a reporter and editor at various newspapers and spent several years as a National Park ranger.</p>
<p><strong>Joshua Hatch</strong> is the assistant editor for data and interactives at<em> The Chronicle of Higher Education</em> in Washington, where he oversees a team&nbsp;of database reporters and designers. He is president of the Online News Association. Previously he was interactives director at <em>USA Today.</em> He teaches&nbsp;online and data journalism in the graduate journalism program at American University.</p>
<p><strong>Rowan Jacobsen</strong> is a freelance science journalist and the author of seven books exploring a wide range of environmental issues, most recently “The Essential Oyster.” He is based in Vermont and has written for a broad array of publications, including <em>Harper’s, Outside, Mother Jones,</em> and <em>Pacific Standard. </em>His work has been featured in “Best American Science and Nature Writing” and has received numerous awards.</p>
<p><strong>Ehsan Masood</strong>&nbsp;is the editor of Research Fortnight, a science policy magazine based in London, and the author of several books, including&nbsp;“The Great Invention: The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World”&nbsp;(2016). He has worked as a writer and editor at <em>Nature</em> and <em>New Scientist, </em>and has made documentaries for BBC radio. He teaches a course on science and innovation policy at Imperial College London.</p>
<p><strong>Jane Qiu</strong> is a globe-trotting freelance science journalist based in Beijing, and a regular contributor to publications including <em>Nature, Science, Scientific American, </em>and <em>The Economist. </em>Her work has focused on environmental and cultural issues, with a particular interest in the Third Pole countries of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. Her writing awards include recognition from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Asian Environmental Journalism Awards.</p>
<p><strong>Kolawole Talabi</strong> is a freelance science writer based in Nigeria and a regular contributor to Mongabay.com. He’s received numerous awards for investigative reporting, on issues ranging from treatment of infectious disease in Africa to endangered natural resources. Last year he was one of five writers honored with the Next Generation of Science Journalists award, given by the World Health Summit in Germany.</p>
<p><strong>Mićo Tatalović </strong>is editor of <em>New Scientist’s</em> environment and life sciences news section. A native of Croatia, he is now based in London, overseeing a team of staff writers and freelancers. He previously worked on the news desk of SciDev.net, helping to coordinate a global network of science journalists reporting from South America, Africa, and Asia, as well as freelancing for wide range of science magazines. He is chair of the Association of British Science Writers, and sits on the&nbsp;board of the Balkan Network of Science Writers.</p>
<p><strong>Caroline Winter </strong>is a staff writer for <em>Bloomberg Businessweek</em> in New York, focusing on science, technology, and medicine. A native of Germany, she previously worked as a freelancer for publications ranging from Spiegel International to <em>The New York Times Magazine.</em> She was a Fulbright fellow in 2008-09 and worked in Berlin, researching, writing, and translating stories.</p>
Photo: Eric Baetscher/Wikimedia CommonsKnight fellowship, Awards, honors and fellowships, Science communications, Science writing, Technology and society, SHASSBig in Japanhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/book-pop-music-japanese-society-0427
Historian’s new book explores pop music and the transformation of Japanese society. Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/book-pop-music-japanese-society-0427<p>In 1929, the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan, a subsidiary of RCA, released a recording of the song “Tokyo March,” an ode to modern life, with lines about “dancing to jazz and drinking liqueur late into the night.” Performed by the singer Sato Chiyako, “Tokyo March” quickly sold 150,000 copies, making it the first big pop hit in Japanese history.</p>
<p>From that point through the 1960s, Japan’s pop music industry became a powerhouse. Despite disruptions due to war and postwar reconstruction, companies churned out hundreds of what were termed “popular songs,” or “ryukoka,” in Japanese.</p>
<p>By the time this pop-music boom slowed, in the 1970s, Japan had transformed itself from a traditional and hierarchical society into a nation where almost everyone described themselves as being part of the country’s middle class.</p>
<p>For Hiromu Nagahara, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Associate Professor of History at MIT, these developments are related. Japanese popular music, he believes, helped create a larger common culture in the country — including a larger culture of consumption — that placed more people on common social ground.</p>
<p>“Japan was a highly class-conscious society,” says Nagahara, referring to the era when “Tokyo March” was released. “For the vast majority of Japanese, they didn’t feel like they were middle class. But by the time you get to the 1970s and 1980s, people feel they are all middle class.”</p>
<p>Now Nagahara has written a new book examining the way popular music became intertwined with the larger transformation of Japan. In “Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents,” published this month by Harvard University Press, he examines the politics of popular music and concludes that “Japan’s masses … emerged not only as the chief consumers of mass media and mass culture but also as the protagonists of the broader social change” that upended the country.</p>
<p><strong>Footloose in ’47</strong></p>
<p>To be sure, as Nagahara explains, “popular” music in Japan during this era accommodated a variety of styles. Some songs, like the star Kasagi Shizuko’s 1947 hit “Tokyo Boogie-Woogie,” the basis of the book’s title, were upbeat and swing-based; others were more somber and hinted at more traditional influences.</p>
<p>As the popular music industry expanded, not everyone became a fan of the new songs. Indeed, a central part of Nagahara’s book addresses the ongoing resistance to pop music, often stemming from cultural elites who preferred other types of Western music, including classical music, which they viewed as a mark of refinement.</p>
<p>“The ongoing concern was that the music was vulgar and low,” says Nagahara. “Well into the 1960s, the common stance of Japan’s intellectual and cultural elite was that these songs were inherently vulgar.”</p>
<p>On one level, that represents a familiar cultural clash, with echoes of generational disputes over rock and roll in the U.S. or Britain. But in Japan, the politics of pop music had some unique features. Consider the post-World War II occupation and reconstruction of Japan by the U.S., which lasted until 1952. Critics of pop music saw the occupation as a chance to squelch Japanese pop music styles and re-emphasize the value of Western music.</p>
<p>For instance, as Nagahara notes, one highbrow pop critic, Aragaki Hideo, argued that the “despair” and “melancholy” of some pop songs were holding the country back. “When I listen to these songs,” he wrote, “I get depressed and the reconstruction of Japanese spirit seems totally impossible.”</p>
<p>That might sound extreme, but it was not an uncommon view to find in print.</p>
<p>“The critics hoped the occupation would help Americanize Japanese music,” Nagahara explains.</p>
<p>It didn’t, however, creating an important social dynamic. Japanese pop music was not only an increasingly common, shared cultural experience for the budding middle class; it was also regarded as a “reflection of the nation’s culture,” as Nagahara puts it. People could be patriotic, and be consumers, at the same time.</p>
<p><strong>Video killed the radio star</strong></p>
<p>The critics of Japanese pop music might have been fighting a “long war,” as Nagahara terms it, but they did not win it. “Popular songs produced by the recording industry became uncontroversial and even came to be seen as part of Japan’s cultural establishment by new generations of musicians,” Nagahara writes in the book.</p>
<p>Instead, the centrality of pop music in Japanese culture finally became limited by other forms of entertainment: mostly television, which became fully pervasive by the 1970s, as well as other Japanese mass-culture products such as cartoons and computer games.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Still, to Nagahara, pop music did not just reflect the changes in Japanese society but helped constitute them, making it part of an important cultural episode.</p>
<p>Other scholars who have read the book agree. Christine Yano, an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii who has also written about Japanese popular music, calls the book “a wonderfully insightful and nuanced history,” which is going to “make a strong contribution to the field of modern Japanese history and pop music and pop culture studies.”</p>
<p>So while the genre of “ryukoka” had become, even by the 1970s, “increasingly antiquated,” as Nagahara puts it, scholars have found that understanding pop music’s impact in the preceding half-century is a valuable window into Japanese life. Or, as a common adage from the time stated: “As the world goes, so go the songs; as the songs go, so goes the world.”</p>
Hiromu Nagahara and his new book, “Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents,” published by Harvard University Press
Photo: Allegra BovermanBooks and authors, History, Japan, Music, Arts, Humanities, Faculty, SHASSWisdom gleaned from data and behavioral economics https://news.mit.edu/2017/wisdom-from-data-behavioral-economics-bill-aulet-0403
In a follow-up to his popular &quot;Disciplined Entrepreneurship,&quot; MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Bill Aulet provides new insights for entrepreneurs.Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400Dylan Walsh | MIT Sloan School of Managementhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/wisdom-from-data-behavioral-economics-bill-aulet-0403<p>Before&nbsp;<a href="http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/detail/?id=9118" target="_blank">Bill Aulet</a>&nbsp;joined the MIT Sloan School of Management as managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, he raised more than $100 million for his own companies. Perhaps the most powerful insight taken from this experience was that entrepreneurship is a craft — not an art or a science, but a craft. It can therefore be studied, practiced, and taught.</p>
<p>Ever since, Aulet has been dedicated to “building a body of knowledge about entrepreneurship and spending time making that readily accessible to other people.” This mentality led him in 2014 to publish “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” which outlines a 24-step process for building a startup. After the book’s release, readers approached him with words of appreciation, followed by questions that the book hadn’t broached. He began to catalog these questions and compose answers. “It’s true that you learn more after publishing a book than before,” Aulet said.</p>
<p>Today, he releases the results of this work in “<a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1119365791.html" target="_blank">Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook</a>,” a follow-up to “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” that dives into matters of practical implementation: How do you conduct primary market research? How, exactly, do you talk to customers? The publication includes a detailed visual dashboard and a series of worksheets to help startups stay on track.</p>
<p><strong>Consider the value of data</strong></p>
<p>The $26.2 billion sale of networking site LinkedIn to Microsoft last summer, one of the largest technology deals on record, crystallized the competitive advantage of consumer data. In a sense, the tech industry has shifted into a third, distinct epoch.</p>
<p>Decades ago, IBM dominated a landscape of companies focused on the manufacture of hardware, like industrial computing machines and storage devices. In time, these companies took a backseat to software developers; the ascent of Microsoft exemplifies this transition. Today’s leaders — Google, Facebook, Twitter — sit atop troves of data, the newest universal currency.</p>
<p>“What’s clear in the present is that winners have to be cognizant of data,” said Aulet. “Though a subtle distinction, this affects the way you think about the entire business.”</p>
<p>In short, the value of data can overshadow the value of the product itself. “Our standard mental model says a business is about the product, the intellectual property, or the patent,” Aulet said. Engineers, especially, tend to think in these terms. While product quality is important, any new company should be equally attentive to “following the trail of digital dust and learning everything you possibly can about the customer.”</p>
<p><strong>Customer acquisition through behavioral economics</strong></p>
<p>Roughly 40 percent of the things we do every day are done out of habit; we give them no thought. For companies — new ones especially — overcoming this status quo and encouraging new purchase habits is a significant challenge.</p>
<p>Two relatively recent insights from behavioral economics can help. First, all consumers pass through “windows of opportunity,” said Aulet, during which a company has a greatly increased chance of influencing decisions. Second, during these windows, particular “triggers” like “only two seats left!” can then be used to pull consumers toward a purchase.</p>
<p>These two related concepts apply to almost every product and are well known by large corporations; but among entrepreneurs, who face greater consumer inertia and for whom the ideas are even more important, there tends to be little study of behavioral marketing principles.</p>
<p>“When customers are in homeostasis, their habits are set and you’re not going to move them,” Aulet said. The trick is thinking carefully through timing and triggers; the new book has a full chapter devoted to this issue.</p>
<p><strong>Breaking rules? Good.</strong></p>
<p>“When all the fish are swimming one way, you need to get excited to swim the other way,” Aulet said. That mentality fundamentally defines the entrepreneur, who should possess “the spirit of a pirate.”</p>
<p>Most facets of our culture, and most people, don’t necessarily value this orientation. When Aulet was going to college, for instance, nobody told him to go out and redefine the rules. “They told us to&nbsp;follow&nbsp;the rules.” But regardless of the major currents, entrepreneurs must be willing to work against them.</p>
<p>He hastened to say this does not mean doing anything unethical. Though pirate-like in spirit, entrepreneurs need to “have the execution skills of a Navy SEAL”: unwavering focus on the goal, and fastidious attention to every detail along the way.</p>
<p>This pairing of vision and execution, which can to a great degree be learned and honed, defines the successful entrepreneur. Aulet, too, is optimistic that spreading this mentality will help the world solve some of its most intractable challenges, from the creation of jobs to the protection of the environment.</p>
<p>“Historically, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial thinking solved so many major problems,” Aulet said. “That’s why it’s needed now more than ever.”</p>
Bill Aulet teaches an MIT Sloan Executive Education entrepreneurship course.Photo: Ellen GlassmanBooks and authors, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), Startups, Business and management, Economics, Behavioral economics, Data, Analytics, Social media, Industry, FacultyStudent perspectives on grad life at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2017/student-blog-mit-graduate-life-0327
A new blog written entirely by MIT graduate students offers a window into a deeply diverse community.
Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0400Chad Galts | School of Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/student-blog-mit-graduate-life-0327<p>Being a graduate student at MIT is … well, it depends whom you ask. With more than 6,000 grad students enrolled in one of 32 doctoral or 27 master’s programs on campus, the variety of experiences (and opinions about those experiences) ranges wildly.</p>
<p>The Office of the Dean for Graduate Education (ODGE) has launched a <a href="http://gradadmissions.mit.edu/blog" target="_blank">new blog</a> written entirely by current graduate students that tries to capture some of this variety. It is an eclectic mix of stories that offers readers a glimpse inside the MIT graduate community.</p>
<p>From inspiring overviews (“MIT is more than Killian Court, chalkboards, and groundbreaking discoveries. It’s the people, the intellectual curiosity, and the relentless passion for all things.”) to in-the-weeds pointers about campus life (“If there is an event, and if I’m on the fence about attending, it will come down to the food. … it can be a bonus on top of a talk by a Nobel laureate.”) to deeply personal revelations (“Honestly, I was scared to ask for help.”) — the blogs are written by students from all five schools at MIT and reflect a deeply varied range of origins, perspectives, and interests.</p>
<p>Modeled on the very popular (and irreverent) <a href="http://mitadmissions.org/blogs" target="_blank">MIT undergraduate admissions blog</a>, which features the musings of undergraduate students, the graduate student blog arose out of a partnership between ODGE, the School of Engineering, and the SoE Communications Lab. More than 100 students applied to participate in a one-week Independent Activities Period workshop on blog writing, which featured talks from dean of engineering Professor Ian Waitz, undergraduate admissions guru Chris Peterson, and Knight Science Journalism at MIT Director Deborah Blum. The 40 students the workshop worked in small groups with communications staff from all over MIT, and 30 of them completed the entries that just went live. Like the undergraduate blog, the new one publishes its submissions under a first-name-last-initial byline to inspire candid expression in its contributors.</p>
<p>One blogger, Dishita T., a graduate student in architecture, says she welcomed the opportunity to share a personal story that might resonate with others. Her piece, “To MIT With Love,” tells of falling in love: the first date in India, the cultural obstacles, and the ways in which a shared passion for MIT created a haven for the couple in Cambridge.</p>
<p>In her entry, Dishita asks: “Was it the moment of falling in love with MIT that brought the guy in my life, or falling in love with him that brought me to MIT?” Not only does MIT change the world at large, it also changes the people here in deep and personal ways, she says. And those tales are worth telling. “Whenever I hear those stories, I’m inspired.”</p>
<p>Because this is MIT, the graduate student blog is also a home for the offbeat. As Daniel G., a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, says: “I wanted to give a voice to the light-hearted nerd-culture vibe that infects most aspects of my life here at MIT, and which I quite enjoy.” In his blog post, Daniel describes explaining his chosen field to those outside of it. When he tells people he’s a theoretical computer scientist, he writes, they sometimes ask: “What does that even mean?”</p>
<p>Daniel describes three flavors of computer scientists: cryptographers, algorithmists, and complexity theorists. “There is a drawback to being a cryptographer,” he writes. “I imagine it’s the same sort of drawback the Hulk would experience in an anger management class. Much like the Hulk can't control his impulse for aggression, the cryptographer can't help but deal in secrets.”</p>
<p>After similar treatments of algorithmists (“in their pursuit for algorithmic nirvana, they have inadvertently forgotten the English language”) and the complexity theorists (“they are like your drunk uncle telling you that your life will never amount to anything”), Daniel wraps up with: “Shhh. You are now part of a secret academic cabal. Welcome to the great conspiracy.”</p>
<p>In the end, the graduate student blog is about opening minds and drawing readers into a research community that is special in ways impossible to quantify. “A PhD can be wild,” says blogger and computer scientist Irene C. Her piece, “My Road to Yelp Elite,” catalogues her comic quest to dine at 180 restaurants, review them for the online ratings website, and, at a good clip, gain Yelp Elite status. (“Whereas I should be asking: interpretable natural language models talk vs. a mentorship lunch for women in computer science? I find myself asking instead: Do I want free Brazilian BBQ or free Indian curry?” she writes.)</p>
<p>Irene tells readers she chased the Yelp Elite moniker as “an escape from the all-consuming life of a PhD student: If I couldn’t figure out how to model the error of a Bayesian network relating medical diseases and symptoms, at least another Yelper had just complimented me on my review of The Friendly Toast.”</p>
<p>About the Graduate Student Blog, Irene says she is excited to contribute to the range of narratives at MIT. “Part of staying sane is finding what makes you come alive and following that — through research and beyond.”</p>
A new blog offers insights from MIT graduate students for prospective or current grad students. Image: Christine Daniloff/MITStudent life, Graduate, postdoctoral, Students, Admissions, School of Engineering, School of Science, Sloan School of Management, SHASS, School of Architecture and Planning, Community, Independent Activities Period, WritingAmerica’s two-track economyhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/america-economy-decline-middle-class-0313
Economist’s new book examines decline of the nation’s middle class.Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/america-economy-decline-middle-class-0313<p>For many people in America, being middle class isn’t what it used to be.</p>
<p>Consider: In 1971, the U.S. middle class — with household incomes ranging from two-thirds to double the national median — accounted for almost 60 percent of total U.S. earnings. But in 2014, middle-class households earned just about 40 percent of the total national income. And, adjusted for inflation, the incomes of goods-producing workers have been flat since the mid-1970s.</p>
<p>“We have a fractured society,” says MIT economist Peter Temin. “The middle class is vanishing.”</p>
<p>Now Temin, the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics, has written a book exploring the topic. “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” published this month by MIT Press, examines the plight of middle-income earners and offers some prescriptions for changing our current state of affairs.</p>
<p>The “dual economy” in the book’s title also represents a bracing reflection of America’s class schism. Temin, a leading economic historian, draws the term from the work of Nobel Prize winner W. Arthur Lewis, who in the 1950s applied the model of a dual economy to developing countries. In many of those nations, Lewis contended, there was not a single economy but a two-track economy, with one part containing upwardly-mobile, skilled workers and the other part inhabited by subsistence workers.</p>
<p>Applied to the U.S. today, “The Lewis model actually works,” Temin says. “The economy can grow, but it detaches from the [subsistence] sector. Simple as it is, the Lewis model offers the benefit that a good economic model does, which is to clarify your thinking.”</p>
<p>In Temin’s terms, updated, America now features what he calls the “FTE sector” — people who work in finance, technology, and electronics — and “the low-wage sector.” Workers in the first sector tend to thrive; workers in the second sector usually struggle. Much of the book delves into how the U.S. has developed this way over the last 40 years, and how it might transform itself back into a country with one economy for all.</p>
<p><strong>Headwinds for workers</strong></p>
<p>As Temin sees it, there are multiple reasons for the decline in middle-class earning power. To cite one: The decline of unionization, he contends, has reduced the bargaining power available to middle class workers.</p>
<p>“In the [political and economic] turmoil of the ’70s and ’80s, the unions declined, and the institutions that had been keeping labor going along with rising productivity were destroyed,” Temin says. “It’s partly [due to] new technology, globalization, and public policy — it’s all of these things. What it did was disconnect wages from the growth in productivity.”</p>
<p>Indeed, from about 1945 until 1975, as Temin documents in the book, U.S. productivity gains and the wage gains of goods-producing workers tracked each other closely. But since 1975, productivity has roughly doubled, while those wages have stayed flat.</p>
<p>Where “The Vanishing Middle Class” moves well beyond a discussion of basic economic relations, however, is in Temin’s insistence that readers consider the interaction of racial politics and economics. As he puts it in the book, “Race plays an important part in discussions of politics related to inequality in the United States.”</p>
<p>To take one example: Again starting in the 1970s, incarceration policies led to an increasing proportion of African-Americans being jailed. Today, Temin notes, about one in three African-American men will serve jail time, which he calls “a very striking figure. You can see how that would just destroy the fabric of a community.” After all, those who become imprisoned see a significant reduction in their ability to obtain healthy incomes over their lifetimes.</p>
<p>For that matter, Temin observes, incarceration has expanded so dramatically it has affected the ability of society to pay for prisons, which may be a factor that limits their further growth. At the moment, he notes in the book, the U.S. states pay roughly $50 billion a year for prisons and roughly $75 billion annually to support higher education.</p>
<p><strong>Solutions?</strong></p>
<p>Temin contends in the book that a renewed focus on education is a principal way to distribute opportunities better throughout society.</p>
<p>“The link between the two parts of the modern dual economy is education, which provides a possible path that children of low-wage workers can take to move into the FTE sector,” Temin writes.</p>
<p>That begins with early-childhood education, which Temin calls “critically important” — although, he says, “in order to continue those benefits, [students] have to build on that foundation. That goes all the way up to college.”</p>
<p>And for students in challenging social and economic circumstances, Temin adds, what matters is not just the simple acquisition of knowledge but the classroom experiences that lead to, as he puts it, “Knowing how to think, how to get on with people, how to cooperate. All the social skills and social capital … [are] going to be critically important for kids in this environment.”</p>
<p>In the book Temin bluntly advocates for greater investment in public schools as well as public universities, saying that America’s “educational system was the wonder of the 20th century.” It still works very well, he notes, for kids at good public schools and for those college students who graduate without burdensome debt.</p>
<p>But for others, he notes, “We don’t have a path for the next generation to have what we expect for a middle-class life … [and] not everyone wants to finance it.”</p>
<p>“The Vanishing Middle Class” comes amid increasing scrutiny of class relations in the U.S., but at a time when the public discussion of the topic is still very much evolving. Gerald Jaynes, a professor in the departments of Economics and African American Studies at Yale University, calls Temin’s new book “a significant addition to the existing literature on inequality.”</p>
<p>Temin, for his part, hopes that by the end of “The Vanishing Middle Class,” readers will agree that a society paying for more education will have made a worthy investment.</p>
<p>“The people in this country are the resource we have,” Temin says. “If we maintain the character of our fellow citizens, that is really our national strength.”</p>
“We have a fractured society,” says MIT professor Peter Temin. “The middle class is vanishing.” His new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” is being published this month by MIT Press.
Books and authors, Faculty, Economics, History, Government, Social sciences, Policy, SHASS, MIT Press, K-12 education, PovertyGlobal agreementshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/book-horizons-language-analysis-0310
In new book, MIT linguist expands the horizons of language analysis.
Fri, 10 Mar 2017 10:30:00 -0500Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/book-horizons-language-analysis-0310<p>Many linguistics scholars regard the world's languages as being fundamentally similar. Yes, the characters, words, and rules vary. But underneath it all, enough similar structures exist to form what MIT scholars call universal grammar, a capacity for language that all humans share.</p>
<p>To see how linguists find similariites that can elude the rest of us, consider a language operation called "allocutive agreement." This is a variation of standard subject-verb agreement. Normally, a verb ending simply agrees with the subject of a sentence, so that in English we say, “You go,” but also, “She goes.”</p>
<p>Allocutive agreement throws a twist into this procedure: Even a third-person verb ending, such as “she goes,” changes depending on the social status of the person being spoken to. This happens in Basque, for one. It also occurs in Japanese, says MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, even though Japanese has long been thought not to deploy agreement at all. But in fact, Miyagawa asserts, the same principles of formality appear in Japanese, if you know where to look.</p>
<p>“It goes a long way toward the idea that there's agreement in every language,” says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. “In Japanese this politeness system has exactly the same distribution as the Basque allocutive system.”</p>
<p>Now Miyagawa has published a book — “Agreement Beyond Phi,” out today from the MIT Press — that explores some of these unexpected structural similarities among languages. The book has a second aim, as well: Miyagawa would like to orient the search for universal linguistic principles around a greater diversity of languages. (The title, incidentally, refers to agreement systems that are not found in Indo-European languages.)</p>
<p>Because English is the native language of so many great linguists, he observes, there is a tendency to regard it as a template for other languages. But drawing more heavily on additional languages, Miyagawa thinks, could lead to new insights about the specific contents of our universal language capacity; he cites the work of MIT linguist Norvin Richards as an example of this kind of work.</p>
<p>“Given the prominence of Indo-European languages, especially English, in linguistic theory, one sometimes gets the impression that if something happens in English it’s due to universal grammar, but if something happens in Japanese, it’s because it’s Japanese,” Miyagawa says.</p>
<p><strong>Not mere formalities</strong></p>
<p>To see why allocutive agreement seems like such a compelling example to Miyagawa, take a very brief look at how it works.</p>
<p>The best-known examples of addressing people formally come from Indo-European languages such as French, in which second-person subject-verb agreement changes in a simple way, depending on the social status of the person being addressed. Consider the phrase, “You speak.” To a peer or friend, you would use the informal version, “Tu parles.” But to a teacher or an older stranger you would likely use the more formal agreement, “Vous parlez.”</p>
<p>What happens in Basque and Japanese is a bit more complicated, however, since both informal and formal modes of address are employed even when speaking about other people. For instance, in Basque, consider a phrase Miyagawa dissects in the book, “Peter worked.” To a male friend, you would say, “Peter lan egin dik.” But to someone with higher social status, you would say, “Peter lan egin dizu.” The verb ending — the verb is last word in this sentence — changes even though it remains in the third person.</p>
<p>And while Japanese grammar differs in many ways from Basque grammar, Miyagawa contends in the new book that Japanese “politeness marking” follows the same rules. The sentence “Taro said that Hanako will come,” for example, includes the politeness marking “mas” when being spoken in a formal setting. In Japanese, transliterated in English characters, this becomes: “Taroo-wa hanako-ga ki-mas-u to itta.” But for the same sentence, when spoken to a peer, the “mas” disappears.</p>
<p>This kind of agreement, Miyagawa notes, is something he proposed in a 2010 book — titled, “Why Agree? Why Move?” — but did not observe until about 2012.</p>
<p>“I found in Basque the prediction I made in 2010 but couldn’t substantiate then,” Miyagawa says. “It’s exactly the same agreement system.”</p>
<p>Strikingly, Basque and Japanese seem to have very different origins. And Basque — although spoken in the Basque region that lies in between France and Spain — is not an Indo-European language. Indeed, linguists are not certain how to account for the origins of Basque. The presence of allocative agreement in both tongues, then, suggests a deep and unexpected universality among the kinds of linguistic rules that can occur.</p>
<p><strong>Unpredictable</strong></p>
<p>Miyagawa acknowledges he cannot predict precisely how his colleagues in linguistics will react to the book’s agenda, but says he has gotten a positive reception when presenting its concepts at conferences.</p>
<p>Certainly, some linguists have been very receptive to Miyagawa’s arguments. Johan Rooryck, a professor of French linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, has said that Miyagawa’s new book “makes an elegant and compelling case for this exciting perspective.”</p>
<p>Miyagawa himself stresses that the point of the research is not to upend the conceptual foundations of universal grammar — as codified by MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and many others — but to expand the range of comparisons available to linguists. Beyond English, Japanese, and Basque, the book also draws on similarities found in Dinka (spoken in Sudan) and Jingpo (spoken in China and Burma), among other languages.</p>
<p>The book, he says, “is heavily influenced by the insights of the previous work, [and is] standing on the shoulders of some of the great minds, of Chomsky and many others.”</p>
<p>But when linguists look at more and more languages, Miyagawa adds, “You start to discover things you never noticed before.”</p>
MIT professor Shigeru Miyagawa’s new book — “Agreement Beyond Phi,” out today from the MIT Press — explores the unexpected structural similarities among languages.
Photo: Melanie Gonick/MITSHASS, Linguistics, Faculty, Research, Books and authorsClimate@MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2017/climate-at-mit-0227
New online publication reports on climate science research at the Institute. Mon, 27 Feb 2017 17:45:01 -0500Lauren Hinkel | Oceans at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2017/climate-at-mit-0227<p>A new online publication,&nbsp;<a href="http://climate-science.mit.edu/" target="_blank">Climate@MIT</a>, reports on cutting-edge climate science research on campus and in the field. Co-sponsored by&nbsp;MIT’s <a href="http://web.mit.edu/lorenzcenter/" target="_blank">Lorenz Center</a>&nbsp;and the MIT Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (<a href="http://paocweb.mit.edu/" target="_blank">PAOC</a>) in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (<a href="http://eapsweb.mit.edu/" target="_blank">EAPS</a>), Climate@MIT unifies crosscutting research at MIT aimed at tackling some of the biggest questions and issues of our time into one platform. Further, it disseminates issues that MIT climate scientists confront and demystifies the complexities that they navigate while conducting their research. While focusing on climate as a fundamental science, Climate@MIT will occasionally also comment on climate action and policy.</p>
<p>Researchers participating in Climate@MIT are dedicated to uncovering the causes and implications of climate changes for our past, present, and future world. Using observations, theory, and models, contributors aim to unite algorithmic, computational, physical, biogeochemical, and technological innovations to illustrate how the climate has been and is being modified through time. Elements of computational fluid dynamics, statistics, meteorology, oceanography, cryospheric and land surface processes, and computer science add definition to the larger picture of Earth’s changes. Researchers also investigate interactions between organisms, human activities, and ecosystems, which provide additional levels of feedback on natural processes affecting Earth’s climate and its changes over time.</p>
<p>While the field of climate science is ever-evolving as new facets are discovered, a key goal of Climate@MIT is to provide current, accurate, and relevant climate research and reporting to governments, industries, and citizens — all while helping foster an informed society, aware of the intricacies involved with climate research and armed with information to understand our changing planet.</p>
Climate@MITImage: Lauren HinkelClimate, Research, Earth and atmospheric sciences, EAPS, Policy, Climate change, Lorenz Center, School of Science, Science communications, Science writingMIT Press Bookstore launches new author serieshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-press-bookstore-launches-author-series-0210
Authors@MIT series features speakers on the cutting edge of timely topics.Fri, 10 Feb 2017 17:20:01 -0500MIT Presshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-press-bookstore-launches-author-series-0210<p>This month the MIT Press Bookstore is launching an exciting new series of events,&nbsp;Authors@MIT. The series features authors and experts on the cutting edge of topics that we all need to know more about, among them: young people and new media, business innovation, life in a digitally defined world, the intersection of science and art, the future of technology, the nature of knowledge, and more. While most of the events will be at the Press Bookstore, some will take place at other area venues, in collaboration with the Boston Book Festival, the Cambridge Public Library, Le Laboratoire, local restaurants, and other partners.</p>
<p>“The MIT Press Bookstore has long been a cornerstone in the intellectual life of the Institute and in the expanding innovation district surrounding MIT,” says Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press. “With our recent move to the Massachusetts Ave. side of campus and with our expanded facility, we’re really thrilled to have the opportunity to offer the community a completely new kind of author series, explicitly designed to promote public engagement with science, technology, and design broadly defined, featuring short informal talks with audience and panel discussion."</p>
<p>The series will include one or two events per month and will begin on Feb. 28 with a talk by Meryl Alper, Northeastern University associate professor of communication studies and faculty associate with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in conversation with Jennifer Light, professor and head of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society and professor of urban studies and planning at MIT. They’ll be discussing Alper’s new MIT Press book, "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/giving-voice" target="_blank">Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality</a>" at 6 p.m. at the MIT Press Bookstore’s new location at 301 Massachusetts Avenue. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Additional upcoming talks include MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito in discussion with MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer about Ito’s book "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-old-cambridge" target="_blank">Whiplash: How to Survive our Faster Future</a>"; MIT’s Peter Temin discussing his timely new book, "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/vanishing" target="_blank">The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy</a>"; and later this spring, Susan Maycock and Charles Sullivan, from the Cambridge Historical Commission, will discuss their recent book, "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-old-cambridge" target="_blank">Building Old Cambridge: Architecture and Development</a>."&nbsp;</p>
<p>For more information or to sign up for news about upcoming events, visit <a href="http://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/events-2/" target="_blank">mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/events</a>.</p>
Authors@MIT events will take place at the MIT Press Bookstore and other area venues.MIT Press, Special events and guest speakers, Books and authors, CommunityHow the smallest, most abundant bacteria inspired a children&#039;s book series https://news.mit.edu/2017/how-the-smallest-most-abundant-bacteria-inspired-childrens-books-0131
Institute Professor Penny Chisholm teams up with author and illustrator Molly Bang to write environmental children’s book series.Tue, 31 Jan 2017 17:50:01 -0500Carolyn Schmitt | Department of Civil and Environmental Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2017/how-the-smallest-most-abundant-bacteria-inspired-childrens-books-0131<p>How do plants bring the Earth to life? How does the sun move water around the Earth?</p>
<p>These are seemingly elementary questions, but many people — young and old — struggle to answer them. As a professor of 7.014 (Introductory Biology) for undergraduate students at MIT, Institute Professor Sallie (Penny) Chisholm recognizes that photosynthesis and other natural processes don’t sink in for a lot of people. In response, Chisholm partnered with her longtime friend, award winning children’s book author and illustrator Molly Bang, to write a series of children’s books explaining these fundamental environmental processes in an approachable way.</p>
<p>The pair has since created the “Sunlight Series,” a collection of children’s books written about different environmental topics from the point of view of the sun. The latest in the series, “Rivers of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water around the Earth,” explains the global water cycle.</p>
<p>At first, the Sunlight Series wasn’t written with a specific audience in mind; it was just to make this critical information available in an easy-to-understand way. “This is fundamental information about how the Earth works that nobody understands, even educated people who have taken classes on these topics. They don’t remember it because it’s too weird to think of plants and life coming from the air and from the sun,” Chisholm said.</p>
<p>The series is meant to stand the test of time by explaining fundamental processes, but that doesn’t stop Chisholm and Bang from briefly acknowledging humans' uncertain impact on the environment by touching on topics such as climate change and fossil fuels. Chisholm asks, “If you don’t understand that the mass of plants come from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that there’s a massive exchange of CO<sub>2</sub>, from photosynthesis and respiration, how can you understand the role of fossil fuels and climate change?”</p>
<p><strong>From scientist to children’s book author </strong></p>
<p>The first page of “Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life,” the first book by Chisholm and Bang, asks readers to “Lay your hand over your heart, and feel. Feel your heart pump, pump, and pump. Feel how warm you are. That is my light, alive inside of you.” Chisholm recalls one of her adult friends reading this part of the book and thinking that it was a metaphor, so Chisholm explained to her that solar energy is literally the energy that keeps bodies warm. The food we eat has its origins in photosynthesis, so the chemical energy in the food comes from the sun. We metabolize that food to keep our bodies warm.</p>
<p>“Even after reading the book it didn’t sink in for her, and then when it sunk in she had this huge epiphany. That was really rewarding to me, because that’s really what we’re trying to get at, that everything is connected,” Chisholm said.</p>
<p>Despite being labeled children’s books, the Sunlight Series appeals to all age groups. The illustrations, hand-painted by Bang, are colorful and animated, but are also structurally and anatomically correct. On one page from “Living Sunlight,” Chisholm jokes that there are “glucose in the sky with diamonds,” referring to the Beatles’ hit song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” since there are sparkling glucose molecules embedded into the design of the horizon. The latest book, “Rivers of Sunlight,” also features water molecules pulled out of grand ocean artwork. Bang’s parents were scientists, and she learns the science behind the illustrations from Chisholm. It also furthers the educational motivation behind the series. A 7th grade student who read Chisholm and Bang’s books told Chisholm that the series made topics he had read about in school more accessible and easier to comprehend with the pictures.</p>
<p>Chisholm acknowledges that she cannot be too detailed and scientific in the books, since they are simplified for young readers. To compensate, each book ends with notes that dive deeper into the complex topics and processes that are mentioned in each story.</p>
<p><strong>Finding inspiration in famous research </strong></p>
<p>Chisholm, who has been at MIT since 1976, is currently an Institute Professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Biology. She is most well-known for her role in discovering <em>Prochlorococcus</em>, the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic organisms on Earth. They form the base of the ocean food web and produce a significant amount of oxygen in the ocean. <em>Prochlorococcus</em> are small phytoplankton, essentially little plants in the ocean that are able to photosynthesize, like plants on land. <em>Prochlorococcus</em> are too specific for the elementary reading level of the Sunlight Series, but phytoplankton are introduced in “Ocean Sunlight,” Bang and Chisholm’s second book, and the careful reader can find them in the illustrations.</p>
<p>In 2013, Chisholm was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama for her research. To balance teaching, conducting research, and writing books, Chisholm typically works a lot on the Sunlight Series over the summer, the time of year when Bang also resides in Massachusetts. “Everything I do is a lot of work, but it goes in spurts,” Chisholm said. She and Bang had been brainstorming a book topic for about a decade before publishing “Living Sunlight” in 2009.</p>
<p>The Sunlight Series provides an overview of Earth’s natural processes, giving a simplified explanation in layman’s terms in a short amount of pages. Chisholm says that the simplicity of <em>Prochlorococcus</em>, due to its small amount of information, essentially inspired the Sunlight Series in this way. While the series gives a brief overview of natural processes, Chisholm describes <em>Prochlorococcus </em>as similarly having the smallest amount of information in its genome that is able to make life out of solar energy and inorganic compounds.</p>
<p>Bang and Chisholm tell the story of the Earth through the point of view of the sun, just as Chisholm’s research tells the story of <em>Prochlorococcus</em>. She says that <em>Prochlorococcus</em> keeps her inspired in her field. “It has so many stories to tell. It’s floating around out there in the oceans and it has been evolving for eons. Every genome that we sequence, every strain that we isolate, every other strain that we put it together with, they have conversations. I think about it as something that is trying to tell us its stories.”</p>
MIT Institute Professor Sallie (Penny) Chisholm poses with the first two books in the “Sunlight Series,” a collection of children's books that teach Earth's natural processes from the point of view of the sun. Photo: James LongFaculty, Science writing, Science communications, K-12 education, Biology, Civil and environmental engineering, Photosynthesis, Earth and atmospheric sciences, Books and authors, School of Engineering, School of Science, education, Education, teaching, academicsInterstellate: Celebrating the the beauty of neurosciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2017/interstellate-neuroscience-art-magazine-0109
Caitlin Vander Weele, a graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences, launches a collaborative neuro-art pictorial magazine. Mon, 09 Jan 2017 17:35:01 -0500Rachel Traughber | Department of Brain and Cognitive Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2017/interstellate-neuroscience-art-magazine-0109<p>“Scientists take beautiful images of the brain every day, and for the most part no one gets to see them," says Caitlin Vander Weele, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"Experiments fail all the time and the images just get buried. People don’t really get to see that side of science. At the end of the day, they aren’t really failed experiments. They help us generate better methods and come up with better hypotheses.”</p>
<p>A fifth-year graduate student in the lab of Assistant Professor Kay Tye, Vander Weele recently launched&nbsp;<em>Interstellate</em>, a neuro-art pictorial magazine, to share these images with the world.</p>
<p>The idea for creating the magazine evolved through social media. “I started tweeting images out and people gravitated towards them, both scientists and non-scientists,” says Vander Weele. “It occurred to me that using these kind of images might be really useful for science outreach and communication.”</p>
<p>Vander Weele had already begun to create a visual thesis of her work in the Tye lab to help explain her research at MIT to non-scientist friends and family. Expanding on that idea, she eventually collected between 150 and&nbsp;200 images from 69 scientists in nine different countries.</p>
<p>“I was very surprised at how enthusiastic people were about the project. At the end of the day, you’re sharing data, and not everyone is comfortable doing that,” explains Vander Weele.</p>
<p>The magazine’s brilliantly colored images span the regions of the brain and include everything from individual neurons to clusters of cells, brain slices, and in one image, an entire rat brain. The broad range of colors and techniques used showcase the variety of ways that scientists are able to label different kinds of neurons and processes in the brain for study.</p>
<p>“Imagine you have a whole bunch of different types of noodles packed into a baseball, and you want to find the spaghetti. This is basically the same problem encountered by scientists wanting to target only a small number of cells in the brain. How do you do that? One way is to create a transgenic animal capable of expressing a fluorescent protein in a specific cell type that you want. When you slice the brain and look at it under a microscope, these neurons&nbsp;actually glow. Another way is a viral approach that enables us to insert modified DNA sequences that express a gene of interest, such as one that emits a fluorescent signal. You inject this virus into a brain region of interest and based on how it is designed, it will express your fluorescent protein only in specific cell types,” explains Vander Weele.</p>
<p>These techniques are part of the reason that Vander Weele came to MIT for graduate work. Originally from Frankenmuth, Michigan, her research in the Tye lab uses cutting edge tools, including optogenetics and in vivo calcium imaging. She was particularly interested in manipulating communication between different brain regions which share information about what is good and bad in our environment.</p>
<p>“When I was doing research as an undergraduate, scientists really didn’t have the tools to specifically manipulate connections between brain regions. We would lesion an area, or cause damage to it, or use electrical methods that weren’t very specific. MIT was leading the way in a lot of research that allowed us to precisely target a projection’s pathways in the brain and manipulate them. It was incredibly exciting.”</p>
<p>With so many images to choose from, selecting those that would be included in the magazine was a difficult choice. Volume two of&nbsp;<em>Interstellate</em>&nbsp;is already in the works, with new images being submitted weekly.</p>
<p>“My plan is to do one, maybe two more editions before passing the magazine on to someone else. It’s been a fantastic hobby: I’m interested in it, I’ve learned a lot through it, and I think that someone else could really benefit from working on it, as well.”</p>
Detail from an Interstellate coverImage courtesy of Caitlin Vander Weele.Science communications, Science writing, Arts, Neuroscience, Students, Graduate, postdoctoral, Picower Institute, Brain and cognitive sciences, School of Science&quot;Hidden Figures&quot; screening, discussion addresses the history of black women at NASAhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/hidden-figures-screening-addresses-history-of-black-women-at-nasa-1222
Author and executive producer Margot Lee Shetterly explores inspiration for the film; MIT guest speakers provide additional historical context. Thu, 22 Dec 2016 13:50:01 -0500William Litant | Department of Aeronautics and Astronauticshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/hidden-figures-screening-addresses-history-of-black-women-at-nasa-1222<p>In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States&nbsp;was engaged in a frantic competition with the Soviet Union to launch the first Earth-orbiting satellite, place a human in space, and, ultimately, set foot on the moon. Laboring behind the scenes in this monumental technological effort were what NASA termed “colored computers,” African-American female mathematicians responsible for&nbsp;critical calculations and other technical works.</p>
<p>On Dec. 25, 20th Century Fox will release the film “<a href="http://www.foxmovies.com/movies/hidden-figures" target="_blank">Hidden Figures</a>,” based on the book of the same title by <a href="http://margotleeshetterly.com" target="_blank">Margot Lee Shetterly</a>. The film tells the true-life story of three of these unsung heroes whose work played a key role in NASA's space race victories. But on Dec. 8, the MIT community enjoyed a sneak preview&nbsp;screening of the film, thanks to Fox and&nbsp;the MIT Department of&nbsp;Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), with the&nbsp;MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program&nbsp;and the Consortium for Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality as co-sponsors.</p>
<p>In his review of the film, <em>Variety</em>&nbsp;critic Peter Debruge noted “just how thoroughly the deck was stacked against these women.” He wrote, “‘Hidden Figures’ is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts.”</p>
<p>Following the MIT screening at the Kendall Square Cinema, a panel comprised of Shetterly, MIT Museum Director of Collections Deborah Douglas, and Insitute Professor Sheila E. Widnall offered comments on the film and solicited input from the audience of MIT students, staff, and faculty. Recently retired NASA astronaut and AeroAstro alumna Cady Coleman '83 also addressed the audience.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Shetterly, who co-produced the film, provided insights into how she was inspired to write <a href="http://margotleeshetterly.com/margot-lee-shetterly-narrative-non-fiction-writing-research" target="_blank">her book</a>&nbsp;after growing up with a father who worked as a research scientist&nbsp;at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. She also noted that, while the film focuses on three individuals, she learned about scores of women at NASA while doing research for her book, which was published earlier this fall.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Widnall, who came to MIT as an undergraduate in 1956 and would later become the Institute’s first female engineering professor, was “shocked”&nbsp;by the fact that one of the film's protagoinsts, Mary Jackson, was told outright that she couldn't aspire to be an&nbsp;engineer&nbsp;simply because she was a woman. “At MIT, I was never told I couldn’t be an engineer. I never felt I didn’t belong,” Widnall said.&nbsp;She added that the hurdles faced by the women in the story “is a lesson we must never forget.”</p>
<p>Douglas, who authored the book “American Women and Flight Since 1940” (University Press of Kentucky, 2004),&nbsp;moderated the panel. She noted that Shetterly’s work “captures a really basic aspect of aeronautical engineering in the mid-20th century: that engineering analysis relied on a lot of number crunching — not just a few quick computations with a slide rule but reams and reams of equations solved one after another, and while computers would eventually do this, the reality is that there were large cadres of human computers, mostly women, who performed these calculations.”</p>
<p>AeroAstro fourth-year student Rachel Harris said she was struck by the hurdles the characters in the movie faced and how they surmounted them. “I hope that this movie can generate a similar response in the broader nation such that we can continue to identify and fix the inequalities we still face,” Harris said.</p>
<p>Ashley Simon, a second-year biology major, found the film “powerful.” “I feel like it took we college students out of our comfort zone, which is the time we live in. We’ve all heard stories about the time, but to see what was happening is something totally different. The film took me on an emotional rollercoaster,” Simon said. Simon was particularly pleased that author Shetterly attended the event. “She provided us with more insight into the stories and told us more about the real women she interviewed. Margot Lee Shetterly was the piece to the puzzle that I didn’t even know was missing.”</p>
<p>Douglas summed up her reaction to the event: “The most powerful thing for me was to see how deeply affecting the film was for many in the audience.&nbsp;A starving person sometimes doesn’t know how hungry he or she is until there is an abundance of food.&nbsp;From the audience comments, I think there is a very deep hunger among many at MIT for the kind of affirmation that this film provides.”</p>
<p>Copies of the&nbsp;“Hidden Figures” book — including a special young readers' edition — were available at a discounted price prior to the screening, courtesy of the MIT Press.&nbsp;For those interested in diving further into the hidden histories of black women at NASA,&nbsp;the book is the next selection&nbsp;in MIT's all-community book club, MIT Reads. For information on discussion dates, visit the <a href="http://libraries.mit.edu/mit-reads/" target="_blank">MIT Reads&nbsp;website</a>.</p>
"Hidden Figures" author and producer Margot Lee Shetterly fields a question at the MIT pre-release screening of the film based on her book. MIT Museum Director of Collections Deborah Douglas (left) and Institute Professor Sheila Widnall were also on the post-screening discussion panel.Photo: William Litant/Department of Aeronautics and AstronauticsSpecial events and guest speakers, Film and Television, Books and authors, History, NASA, Diversity and inclusion, Women in STEM, SHASS, Women, History of science, Space, astronomy and planetary science, Libraries, MIT PressMIT Press Bookstore celebrates new homehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-press-bookstore-celebrates-new-home-1205
New location hopes to further engage the MIT and Cambridge communities.Mon, 05 Dec 2016 16:20:01 -0500MIT Presshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-press-bookstore-celebrates-new-home-1205<p>On Wednesday, Nov. 16,&nbsp;MIT faculty and students, along with&nbsp;others in the Cambridge community, joined staff of the MIT Press to&nbsp;celebrate the grand opening of the MIT Press Bookstore's new location.&nbsp;The MIT Press Bookstore, which had been open on Main Street in Kendall&nbsp;Square since 1980, is now up and running in its new 2,350-square-foot&nbsp;location at 301 Massachusetts Ave.</p>
<p>The event featured a demonstration of the press's new Espresso Book&nbsp;Machine. The innovative machine combines several technologies into a&nbsp;single device which, when paired with a printer, can print, glue, and trim&nbsp;a perfect-bound paperback book, complete with a full-color cover, in about five minutes. Patrons explored the aisles of the new store, browsing a vast&nbsp;selection of titles on science, technology, art, and culture, as the&nbsp;Espresso Book Machine whirred at the back of the shop. Titles printed for&nbsp;the opening demonstration included a 1904 biography of MIT founder William Barton&nbsp;Rogers written by James P. Munroe, and several out-of-print books from the&nbsp;MIT Press archive.</p>
<p>MIT Press Director Amy Brand welcomed guests, remarking that the spacious&nbsp;new location will be instrumental in the press's aim to become "even more&nbsp;of a force for intellectual engagement in the community, and even more of&nbsp;an ambassador for the Institute, with many more author events on site. I foresee a very bright future for books and bookstores, for the MIT Press&nbsp;in particular, with its distinctive brand of activism and truth-telling in&nbsp;art, science, and scholarship."</p>
<p>MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg stated that the joint mission of the press and libraries is to "provide high quality scholarship to all who need it." The bookstore has "been a beloved destination for the global community."</p>
<p>David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science in the Program in Science,&nbsp;Technology, and Society and author of 'Becoming MIT" (MIT Press 2010), said&nbsp;the press continues to produce "smart, engaging works at the cutting&nbsp;edge," and that the work of the press and bookstore is now "more important&nbsp;than ever."</p>
<p>The new location will greatly expand the reach of the bookstore in the&nbsp;community in Cambridge and beyond. The MIT Press Bookstore will be open&nbsp;Monday through Friday from 9&nbsp;a.m. ­to 7&nbsp;p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday&nbsp;from noon to 6&nbsp;p.m. and features MIT Press titles and books of interest&nbsp;to the MIT community. Watch for some thought-provoking author events in&nbsp;the coming months.</p>
<p>Jay Keyser, professor of linguistics emeritus and&nbsp;editor of the <em>Linguistics Inquiry</em> Monograph Series, summed up the&nbsp;excitement and emotion of the evening by saying of the new bookstore, "Thank goodness it's here. Physical books unite body and soul."</p>
The MIT Press Bookstore is now located on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. MIT Press, Books and authors, Campus buildings and architecture, Cambridge, Boston and region, LibrariesProfessor Hung Cheng pledges $1 million for a new MIT scholarshiphttps://news.mit.edu/2016/professor-hung-cheng-establishes-new-scholarship-1129
Inspired by writing his novel, &quot;Nanjing Never Cries,&quot; Cheng hopes scholarship helps MIT students work toward a better world.Tue, 29 Nov 2016 14:35:01 -0500Bendta Schroeder | School of Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/professor-hung-cheng-establishes-new-scholarship-1129<p>MIT professor of applied mathematics <a href="http://math.mit.edu/directory/profile?pid=42" target="_blank">Hung Cheng</a> has pledged $1 million to establish a new scholarship for MIT students. The Hung and Jill Cheng Scholarship Fund will fully support undergraduates beginning this academic year.</p>
<p>Cheng was inspired to establish the scholarship through writing his novel, "<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nanjing-never-cries" target="_blank">Nanjing Never Cries</a>" (MIT Press, 2016), which follows four people as they survive the 1937 Nanjing massacre and cope with its aftermath during the Sino-Japanese War. The scholarship will give first preference to students from Nanjing, China, and then to students from China and to students of Chinese descent.</p>
<p>MIT plays a special role in the lives of the characters of Cheng’s novel. John Winthrop, an American, and Calvin Ren, a Nanjing native, meet at MIT, where they build a close friendship as they study, physics, aeronautical engineering, and mechanical engineering. When Winthrop accepts Ren’s invitation to work with him on designing and building airplanes in China on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, they discover that their strong bond and strong education in science and technology have given them the means to make a significant practical contribution to the Chinese war effort.</p>
<p>Cheng believes that MIT is uniquely qualified to prepare students to do the kind of world-changing work accomplished by the characters in his novel, and hopes that his new scholarship will enable more students access the valuable education and supportive community that MIT offers.</p>
<p>“You have a lot of very smart and hardworking people here, talking to each other and being friends, and they all benefit from each other,” Cheng says. “To be nurtured by this environment helps us grow and to become a more useful person. MIT students can do a lot of good — to help wipe out poverty, develop energy, and to help implement medical sciences. If you learn a science or technology background very well from MIT, you can turn it into a very valuable experience and do something useful for humanity.”</p>
<p>Although Cheng’s book is fictional, its characters and events of the book draw in part on Cheng’s own experience growing up in China and as a professor. Born in China in 1937, just a few months after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, Cheng moved to Taiwan as a teenager and then moved to the United States to pursue undergraduate studies at Caltech. After earning his BS in 1959, he stayed at Caltech, earning his PhD in in only two years. After postdoctoral appointments at Caltech, Princeton University, and Harvard University, he came to MIT as an assistant professor in 1965 and rose to the rank of full professor four years later. Since then, he has made significant contributions to gauge-field theory, working with Harvard’s T. T. Wu to formulate an unexpected prediction that the cross-section of colliding protons increases with energy, which <em>The New York Times </em>announced was experimentally confirmed at CERN in 1973. He has also worked on problems in unified field theory related to scale invariance and general relativity.</p>
<p>“I am delighted that my friends Hung Cheng and Jill Tsui have made this gift to MIT,” said Michael Sipser, dean of the MIT School of Science. “Professor Cheng has been my colleague at MIT for many years, and we both know that to solve our most difficult and important problems, MIT needs motivated and creative students. Endowed scholarships make it possible for all brilliant students — even those with limited financial resources — to join our community.”</p>
Professor Hung ChengPhoto: Allegra BovermanEducation, teaching, academics, Books and authors, Faculty, Students, Undergraduate, Mathematics, School of Science, China, Awards, honors and fellowshipsMIT Reads hosts author Janet Mockhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-reads-hosts-author-janet-mock-1129
Shared reading sparks timely conversation about gender, race, and community.Tue, 29 Nov 2016 13:30:01 -0500Hannah Piecuch | MIT Librarieshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-reads-hosts-author-janet-mock-1129<p>MIT Reads, an Institute-wide reading and discussion program, welcomed author, editor, and media professional Janet Mock to a full Kirsch Auditorium Nov. 15 for a conversation about her memoir, "Redefining Realness."</p>
<p>Seated in easy chairs on the stage just one week after the presidential election, Mock and moderator / MIT junior Syn Odu started a timely discussion with Odu’s own questions and then took more from the audience.</p>
<p>As a mixed-race trans woman of color, Mock spoke openly about the fears that the 2016 election results have provoked, in her words, in “brown folk, undocumented folk, black folk, queer folk, trans folk, and disabled people [who] are now having to fight even more to say that we deserve to be here.”</p>
<p>But Mock’s message was not one of fear or defeat. In the election, Mock said she supported Hillary Clinton, but now, “We have a better option, and it’s us. We have to do the work now.” She urged those gathered to deepen their communities, get involved in grassroots organizations that support marginalized populations, and seek out safe places where they can process and heal.</p>
<p>The timing of this author event could not have been more perfect, said PhD student Danielle Olson. “I am a woman of color at MIT and a strong ally of the LBGTQ+ community,” she said. “Last Wednesday I came to campus feeling hyper visible as a black woman on campus — not because MIT isn’t diverse, but [because of] this past election cycle.” Olson, an undergraduate alumna of MIT who returned as a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, says MIT Reads is one of several new opportunities she’s found across campus to support students and give them safe spaces to connect with one another. The program’s inaugural reading selection was also a pleasant surprise. “I am so happy we chose this author,” she said.</p>
<p>“We had a wonderful cross section of the MIT community attend,” said Nina Davis-Millis, who coordinates MIT Reads as part of her role as the director of Community Support and Staff Development at MIT Libraries. “It was a wonderful example of [Director Chris Bourg’s] vision of the libraries being a place on campus where people can have difficult discussions.”</p>
<p>During the question-and-answer portion of the evening, the audience wanted to know how Mock worked through the difficulties of her young life growing up poor and transgender. As an adult, Mock said, she has relied on community and self-care: “Finding spaces in which I can show up and not have to perform or be some kind of leader or figurehead. Where I just show up and be empty and not have to give anyone anything. That helps me process. Writing has always helped me process. Reading has always helped me process.”</p>
<p>The conversational format and intimacy of the discussion struck Dan Calacci, a first-year master’s student in media arts and sciences. “It was unique because it was really just two people who cared quite a bit about intersectional issues having a conversation — and a very personal conversation at that,” he said. “As a white person somewhere between queer and cis, it was super nice to be able to drop in on a conversation like that and hear from people who have thought deeply about these issues.”</p>
<p>The timing was necessary given the events of the prior week, according to Julio Oyola, assistant director of LBGTQ Services at MIT’s Rainbow Lounge. Mock met with a small group of invited students before the public event. Oyola said it was an opportunity to “express their gratitude for her serving as a role model for them as trans folk and queer students of color. It was moving and remarkable especially in light of how some folks are feeling.”</p>
<p>The conversation with Mock was co-sponsored by the Division of Student Life, the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education, the Sloan School Student Life Office, and the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. The author event is one of several community events facilitated by MIT Reads this fall, including smaller group discussions scheduled to accommodate not only students and faculty but also staff and other MIT affiliates. &nbsp;</p>
<p>MIT Reads’ launch comes at a time when community dialogue is more important than ever. Its enthusiastic response across MIT has heartened Davis-Millis: “The thing that really made my heart sing was the idea of the MIT community getting excited about a book and coming together around the act of reading.”</p>
Author and guest speaker Janet Mock (right) and discussion moderator Syn OduSpecial events and guest speakers, Libraries, Books and authors, Diversity, Diversity and inclusion, Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ)Working with purposehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/working-with-purpose-pkg-center-work-study-program-1024
Work-study program creates priceless relationships between MIT students and the local community.Mon, 24 Oct 2016 13:00:01 -0400Natalie Britton | Priscilla King Gray Public Service Centerhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/working-with-purpose-pkg-center-work-study-program-1024<p>Students gain many valuable experiences through their time at MIT, but not many can say they've produced a video that “marries the exciting grossness of listeria with cool cell biology.” Eben Bein, who will be receiving a master of science degree in science writing from MIT this fall, worked on such a video as part of his internship with NOVA, the PBS science series that reaches an average of 5 million viewers a week.</p>
<p>Normally, internships with NOVA are unpaid. But Bein learned from his program administrator that he was eligible to participate in MIT’s <a href="http://studentlife.mit.edu/pkgcenter/work-study" target="_blank">Community Service Work-Study program</a>. The work-study program, run by the <a href="http://studentlife.mit.edu/pkgcenter" target="_blank">Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center</a> (PKG Center), connects students to meaningful — and paid — off-campus community service experiences with local nonprofit, governmental, and community-based organizations.</p>
<p>“NOVA was always a dream, and the fact that I would be compensated for my work made it possible,” Bein says. “Working at NOVA was hugely enriching for someone who wants to be involved in science education and writing. It was, as I imagined, perfect.”</p>
<p>Balancing part-time employment with an MIT course load is not easy. In many cases, however, that part-time work can benefit both the student, by advancing their skills and career goals, and the greater Cambridge community, by enabling non-profit organizations to hire talented MIT students.</p>
<p>Bein worked with the online team at NOVA as a digital video editor, creating education materials. He also worked with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/grossscienceshow" target="_blank">Gross Science</a>, a YouTube channel affiliated with NOVA. Through this experience, Bein gained practical skills, learned new software, and honed his writing skills by working with professional and experienced editors. “There’s no question that working at NOVA will help my career as a science writer — it already has,” Bein notes.</p>
<p>NOVA also benefited from the arrangement by working with a talented MIT student who has a background in science education. As part of his work, Bein produced a full-length <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/women-medical-research/" target="_blank">article</a>, two videos, and developed the script for a third video. He also provided a “fresh brain” for his colleagues at NOVA. In turn, the scientific and educational materials Bein produced will benefit the community. “The lack of science literacy is at the heart of a host of environmental and health problems,” Bein says. “Producing materials to counteract that is, therefore, priceless.”</p>
<p><strong>Helping people regain their lives</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.firstchurchcambridge.org/first-church-in-the-world/first-church-shelter" target="_blank">First Church Shelter</a> in Harvard Square, which offers a temporary home to 14 men at a time, is another nonprofit that has been able to work with MIT students through the work-study program. For the past year, Lisa Lozano, an MIT senior in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been working at the shelter, helping out with clerical work, checking in residents, cleaning, and other tasks. The experience has had a tremendous impact on Lisa, and significantly shaped her career goals.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“I entered MIT with the intention of going to medical school one day, but my experiences in the work-study program showed me that I didn’t want to be a doctor — I just wanted to help people regain their lives in some way,” Lozano says. “Because of the work-study program, I’ve realized that I want to work head-on with others and help people regain their lives through a social work or public health career.” &nbsp;</p>
<p>Lozano also works with first-generation college students at <a href="http://www.classism.org/" target="_blank">Class Action</a>, a nonprofit organization in Jamaica Plain. Her work to help these students and university staff network and connect with others has benefited the community. “It was extremely rewarding to see students and staff from various universities sharing ideas, thoughts, and opinions to better the college experience for first generation students,” Lozano says.</p>
<p>In turn, these experiences helped Lozano learn about nonprofit work, hone her communication and interpersonal skills, and improve her practical skills in design software and WordPress. They have also imparted more intangible benefits, such as getting to know the residents at the First Church Shelter and seeing them improve their lives. As Lozano describes one resident, “He had such a kind heart and wanted to hear about my college experience to make sure I wasn’t overly stressed or anxious even though he had more to worry about.&nbsp;I was extremely happy to see this individual had broken out of the cycle of homelessness and was now living comfortably in the city he was raised in.”</p>
<p><strong>Paying for community work-study</strong></p>
<p>During the 2015-2016 academic year, MIT students earned almost $200,000 through work-study jobs, which helps them pay for their educations. “The work-study program offers many benefits to students and our community employers,” says Chiara Magini, the PKG Center’s community employment administrator. “It is a flexible time commitment for students and they receive competitive incomes, with rates averaging $17 an hour. On the career side, the program helps students build their skills, professional references, and networks. On the personal side, students can make a valuable difference in our community while exploring their interests.”</p>
<p>Employers also highly value the MIT students, often using words like superb, resourceful, instrumental, and integral to describe their work. Jim Stewart, director of the First Church Shelter, who supervised Lozano’s work, praised her efforts and wished for more MIT students like her. “Lisa has communicated deep concern to shelter guests. She knows how to put folks at ease and offer encouragement, which is really appreciated. Send us more like Lisa!"</p>
<p>Both Bein and Lozano encourage their fellow classmates to consider the work-study program. “It is so convenient — why not participate?” Bein says. “I would not have been able to do this internship for free, so I am very grateful for the program.”</p>
<p>Lozano notes that students can work with the PKG Center to learn about different opportunities and explore whether an organization would be interested in hiring a work-study student. “I really wish I had started in my freshman or sophomore year, but I had no idea I would enjoy the work-study experience as much as I do now.”</p>
<p>MIT undergraduate and graduate students can learn about their eligibility by emailing <a href="mailto:studentworker@mit.edu">studentworker@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;</p>
Science writing graduate student Eben Bein spent the summer of 2016 in a community service work-study position at NOVA, the prime-time science television series produced by WGBH Boston.Photo: Chiara MaginiVolunteering, outreach, public service, Student life, Internships, Public Service Center (PSC), Science writing, Science communications, Brain and cognitive sciences, Cambridge, Boston and region, Careers, Students3Q: Leon Glicksman and John Lienhard on how to teach the unteachablehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/3q-leon-glicksman-john-lienhard-on-teaching-the-unteachable-1021
MIT professors take on problem formulation in thermal science: It can be taught, and their new book describes how.Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:45:31 -0400Department of Mechanical Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/3q-leon-glicksman-john-lienhard-on-teaching-the-unteachable-1021<p><em>In August, Leon Glicksman, an MIT professor of architecture and mechanical engineering, and John Lienhard, a professor of mechanical engineering, published "<a href="https://architecture.mit.edu/publication/modeling-and-approximation-heat-transfer" target="_blank">Modeling and Approximation in Heat Transfer</a>" (Cambridge University Press).</em></p>
<p><em>The product of a nearly 20-year-long collaboration between them, the book explores the challenges faced by engineers in systems design and research. Mastery of fancy calculations is well and good, they argue, but students must also acquire a critical and often neglected skill set: the ability to think in physical terms. To this end, the authors focus on how modeling and synthesis can be carried out in practice. This is about thinking the big picture: how to get started, how to identify key physical variables in a problem, how to focus your attention toward what matters.</em></p>
<p><em>The School of Engineering recently spoke with the coauthors (who replied collectively) by email about their new text.</em></p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>How would you describe the origins of this textbook?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>Many excellent textbooks on thermal science are already available, but most of them lack systematic discussions of how modeling and synthesis can be carried out in practice. Specifically, most textbook problems have already been reduced to some kind of clear, physical model: Only analysis remains to be done by, say, calculating a heat-transfer coefficient or manipulating a Fourier series. In practice, the detailed analysis is often the least difficult step. What’s hard is how to get started, what are the key physical variables in a problem — what should be the focus of attention and what can be neglected?&nbsp;</p>
<p>Some people seem to think these skills, which are really stages of problem formulation, cannot be taught formally and that they can be acquired only through long experience with engineering problems. We happen to disagree with that.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Over more than 15 years, we have developed and co-taught a graduate-level subject at MIT on modeling and approximation of thermal systems (Course 2.52/4.424). This new book rises directly out of our experience teaching that course.</p>
<p>The course, and this book, help students break down complex engineering systems into simplified thermal models. They can use these models to investigate and assess essential features of a system — all of this is done through a process of tackling example problems before class, and then discussing various approaches during class.</p>
<p>Both the course and the book owe a lot to the structure of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering’s doctoral qualifying exams, which focus primarily on a candidate’s ability to think in physical terms rather than on his or her ability to do fancy calculations.</p>
<p>We have also found, from our research and consulting, that a simplified model can provide a critical guide for the next steps in research and development. It allows one to weigh different approaches and assess the feasibility of each. This really requires a clear understanding of the important physical processes, and it leads to a better explanation of the need for the work to be done when communicating with colleagues and sponsors.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What modeling techniques do you cover in the book?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>We identify a number of different approaches, among which the formulation of upper and lower bounds is central. For example, if a contributing phenomenon can be bounded and shown to exert a second-order effect, you can just ignore it. Very basic principles are also essential tools: conservation of energy, the second law of thermodynamics, or the use of analogies between thermal and electrical phenomena. Sometimes a suitable simplification can reduce the model of a complicated device to a rather simple one for which a known solution exists.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>What’s a good example of using these modeling techniques in an engineering context?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>Let’s consider something simple. Say you want to design a more efficient photocopier. In large copying machines, toner is fused to paper by applying pressure and heat through a heated fuser roller. To avoid warm-up delays, the fuser roller is typically kept at an elevated temperature between jobs, and the heat lost from the idling fuser roller results in substantial standby energy consumption. So how do you design a copier that is more energy efficient while still offering quick startup?</p>
<p>Before embarking on any design innovations, you need to verify that the heat lost from the fuser roller is the really the major source of standby energy consumption. This means approximating the heat lost from the surface of the fuser roller by convection and radiation, as well as estimating the conduction heat loss through the bearings and supports of the fuser roller. These estimates will identify the most important sources of heat loss, and they can point to the most effective ways to reduce that loss.</p>
<p>We make an upper bound on the rate of radiation heat loss though thermal radiation by assuming the fuser roller is a black body. By comparing this rate to the total energy consumption at idle, we will see if whether radiation can be neglected. A similar order of magnitude estimate may rule out convection heat transfer from the fuser roller. This might lead us to conclude that the most important heat loss is conduction through the roller’s bearings. In that case, one design solution would be to add insulation around the bearing supports.</p>
<p>An alternate approach can also be considered: Keep the fuser roller at room temperature and heat it rapidly when copies are needed. This approach will only work if the fuser roller can be heated fast. Evaluating this approach requires an estimate of the thermal time constant of the fuser roller and a possible redesign of the fuser roller to minimize its mass and heat capacity.</p>
<p>We find that the techniques, and the mindset, of simplified modeling and approximation can carry over to many fields beyond just thermal processes. Over the years, we have gotten some very gratifying feedback from former students who attest to the importance of this approach to their subsequent work in both industry and academia.</p>
Professors Leon Glicksman (left) and John Lienhard recently published "Modeling and Approximation in Heat Transfer," following a nearly 20-year collaboration.Photo: John Freidah/MIT Mechanical EngineeringBooks and authors, 3 Questions, Mechanical engineering, Architecture, Thermodynamics, Energy, Education, teaching, academics, STEM education, School of EngineeringChanging the face of conservatism in the U.S.https://news.mit.edu/2016/book-changing-face-conservatism-us-firing-line-1004
New book by professor Heather Hendershot explores impact of William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line.” Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-changing-face-conservatism-us-firing-line-1004<p>In 1966, when the conservative writer William F. Buckley launched a television talk show, it may not have seemed like a promising endeavor, on the surface.</p>
<p>The show, “Firing Line,” was initially not broadcast on a television network but syndicated to local stations. Even in a lower-tech era, “Firing Line” was low-tech: It simply showed Buckley against a bland backdrop, glass of water nearby, talking for an hour with guests.</p>
<p>Yet “Firing Line” did not just survive on the air for more than three decades; it thrived. Through Buckley, the show became a central platform for the effort of some conservatives to move the Republican Party to the right and, at the same time, bring intellectual respectability and credibility to the conservative movement.</p>
<p>“With ‘Firing Line,’ Buckley forged an appealing mainstream image of right-wing conservatism,” says Heather Hendershot, a professor of film and media in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. Buckley, she adds, showed “that conservatives could be urbane and sophisticated and intelligent, and they weren’t just raving lunatics.”</p>
<p>Hendershot has written a new book about the show, “Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line,” released this week by HarperCollins publishers. In it she analyzes the program’s history, dissects Buckley’s views, and makes the case for the program as a “compelling model” of political engagement with opponents, of a kind missing from politics today.</p>
<p><strong>Empowered after defeat</strong></p>
<p>“Firing Line” emerged in the wake of the 1964 presidential election, when Republican nominee Barry Goldwater moved the party to the right, away from its Eisenhower-like moderates, but lost by a landslide to the Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson.</p>
<p>“Goldwater failed miserably in terms of votes but empowered the right-wing Republicans to come forward,” Hendershot says. Buckley’s goal was to establish conservatives as intellectuals — not merely hawks, social reactionaries, or conspiracy theorists — in American life, while maintaining a free-market, strongly anticommunist ideology.</p>
<p>The Republicans regained control of the White House in 1968, thanks to Richard Nixon, but like some others on the right, Buckley frequently found that Nixon was not conservative enough for his taste.</p>
<p>“Almost everything about Nixon was problematic from Buckley’s point of view,” Hendershot observes. “Like so many hard-right conservatives of the time, he was offended that Nixon spent so much on housing and urban development and put money into American domestic programs. They certainly objected to him going to China.”</p>
<p>By contrast, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 helped push American politics further right. For Buckley, and other movement conservatives, it was a triumphal time — although it may not have been the peak of “Firing Line” as a program, perhaps because all that political success took an edge off the show’s oppositional frisson.</p>
<p>The numerous visits of Reagan to the program, Hendershot suggests, were “not typically gripping shows,” apart from one extended episode when Buckley and Reagan disagreed about the Panama Canal treaties, a contentious issue of the time.</p>
<p>By contrast, Hendershot — having watched an enormous amount of the show’s archives while researching the book — thinks some of the most gripping “Firing Line” episodes come when Buckley debated feminist leaders. Buckley was, to be sure, a traditionalist about gender roles, Hendershot believes, without being too reflexively opposed to successful women.</p>
<p>“Buckley felt women shouldn’t feel pressure to work if they didn’t want to … but he celebrated smart, powerful, and — especially — conservative women who were in the workplace,” Hendershot says. “He thought strong, talented women would just rise to the top.”</p>
<p>Yet as Hendershot recounts, the noted feminist Germaine Greer, author of “The Female Eunuch,” did so well on the “Firing Line” that Buckley even sent her an admiring letter after one appearance.</p>
<p><strong>Civil rights — and civil debates? </strong></p>
<p>Buckley had a seemingly more fraught role in the civil rights debates of the time. In 1957, as Hendershot notes, he had written a controversial piece in <em>The National Review</em>, “Why the South Must Prevail,” that was distinctly skeptical about the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>Yet toward the end of his life, Hendershot recounts, Buckley acknowledged he had been mistaken about the issue, in the sense that “the [federal] government really needed to intervene” to create stronger rights for blacks.</p>
<p>Yet Hendershot concludes that Buckley’s views on race were “much more complicated than [people] would initially think,” something that comes out on “Firing Line” shows where he is interrogating segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.</p>
<p>“They actually were on very different pages,” Hendershot says, adding: “There are all kinds of surprises when you watch the show.” For instance, she adds, “Buckley had sympathy for [the] Black Power [movement] in certain ways, because of its emphasis on personal empowerment, community organizations, and localism” — ideas he saw as consistent with conservative principles, even as some civil rights activists argued that greater integration would not be achieved through such means.</p>
<p>“Firing Line” went off the air in 1999, after 1,429 episodes, and Buckley died in 2008, just as the political landscape was shifting once again. The election of President Barack Obama that year, Hendershot observes, has helped foment a “resurgence of right-wing extremism and conspiratorial thinking” of the kind Buckley once tried to detach from conservatism.</p>
<p>“We are in a moment when the loudest voices seem to be the most extreme,” Hendershot says.</p>
<p>And as strongly as Buckley held to his conservative views, Hendershot thinks, he promoted on “Firing Line” a very different ethos of public debate than the one we have today.</p>
<p>“You could come to it as a conservative and become a better, smarter conservative, or come to it as a liberal and become a better, smarter liberal,” Hendershot says. “He was willing to accept that people might listen to a liberal and think, ‘That’s a good idea.’ But he thought he would win. That is a kind of model that we can take a lot from.”</p>
“Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line,” published by HarperCollins, and written by Heather Hendershot, professor of film and media in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program.Courtesy of HarperCollins (edited by MIT News)Research, SHASS, Politics, Government, Books and authors, Faculty, Humanities, Media, Film and Television, Women, Racism, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, HistoryEngineer, explain thyselfhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/engineer-explain-thyself-commkit-0927
A new online tool helps graduate students communicate — in their own languages.Tue, 27 Sep 2016 15:40:01 -0400School of Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/engineer-explain-thyself-commkit-0927<p>A graduate student doing research on materials for circuit design might not share lab space with someone working on machine learning, but they still have a shared need: to explain what they’re working on to other people. Whether it’s to their advisor, a room full of their peers, a startup accelerator, a project’s funders, or Uncle Frank — at some point everyone who does research is faced with an audience.</p>
<p>And so here comes CommKit, a new online resource poised to make the lives of engineering graduate students easier. Launched on Sept. 22, the CommKit is a website that provides discipline-specific aid to those seeking writing, speaking, and visual design support on a tight deadline. Designed for engineers by engineers — specifically, 50 graduate students who have been working as department- and area-based peer coaches at the <a href="http://mitcommlab.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT Communication Lab</a> — the CommKit was designed to demystify effective scientific communication.</p>
<p>Like most good ideas at MIT, the one for CommKit started with students. While doing peer coaching sessions, graduate students Diana Chien and Scott Olesen, discovered themselves answering many of the same questions, or providing many of the same examples and templates, over and over again. “I remember how overwhelmed I felt as an early graduate student writing abstracts and fellowships,” says Chien. “I googled frantically for support, but the advice I found was scattered randomly and rarely relevant to my field.”</p>
<p>Chien and Olesen approached Jaime Goldstein, who directs the Communication Lab (or Comm Lab), about developing a solution to the need for a consistent go-to resource. The resulting website is organized first by department, and then by communication task — such as poster, grant application, manuscript, or oral presentation. Each task page includes quick tips, structural diagrams, and annotated field-specific examples. “We’re scientists and engineers,” Olesen says. “We thought like scientists and engineers when making the CommKit.”</p>
<p>Enthusiasm about the CommKit, and the Comm Lab’s peer coaching model, is already getting attention beyond campus. “Effectively communicating technical information is a key determinant of the success of students and postdocs at Caltech,” says Trity Pourbahrami, from the Caltech Engineering and Applied Science Division. “I’ve been delighted to connect with the MIT Communication Lab community and look forward to sharing the CommKit with the Caltech community.”</p>
<p>Goldstein, who has directed the Comm Lab since its inception in 2012, says the development of an online resource marks an innovative step forward. The site will continue to evolve, she adds, just as the Comm Lab’s programming has changed and broadened over time so that it could serve more students and be more effective.</p>
<p>Started initially as a cocurricular support program within the Department of Biological Engineering, the Comm Lab has since expanded to include the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Broad Institute. This semester, the program is working with the Sandbox Innovation Program to develop expertise, and coaches, to support students with an interest in innovation.</p>
<p>Each time the program expands to a new department or field, Goldstein adds coaches and content so the program is always immediately relevant for the students it’s there to serve. “Communications can be a very broad topic, but students don’t experience it that way,” Goldstein says. “For them — and for the Comm Lab coaches — it’s about specific tasks, projects, and skills. Students crave help improving things like fellowship applications, grant proposals, and posters, so that’s where we focus our efforts.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
MIT Communication Lab Director Jaime Goldstein says a new online tool will help deadline-driven graduate students write at any hour of the day.Photo: Gretchen ErtlScience communications, Students, Science writing, Funding, School of Engineering, Biological engineering, Broad Institute, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Nuclear science and engineeringSound systemhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/sound-system-contiguity-theory-norvin-richards-0920
In new book, Norvin Richards explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar. Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/sound-system-contiguity-theory-norvin-richards-0920<p>In English, declarative sentences do not usually begin with a verb. Let us suppose you are struggling in a language class, and complain about it to a friend.</p>
<p>“It seems like French is hard,” you say. Fair enough. Still, there is something a bit odd about that sentence: What purpose or meaning does “it” have?</p>
<p>“It doesn’t mean anything,” says Norvin Richards, a professor of linguistics and the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. “It’s just there to stop the sentence from starting with the verb ‘seems.’ You do that in English and you do it in French, but there are languages where you don’t do it.”</p>
<p>For instance: Italian, where the same complaint about your French class would likely be, “Sembra che il francese è difficile.” That starts with a verb; the Italian word “sembra” means “seems” in English. As it happens, both English and French tend not to have sentences beginning with verbs, while such sentences are normal in both Italian and Spanish.</p>
<p>But exactly why do languages differ in this way? Linguists who study syntax have catalogued myriad distinguishing rules and patterns among world languages — without necessarily explaining why such differences exist. But now Richards has a new explanation, detailed in his book, “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/contiguity-theory">Contiguity Theory</a>,” recently published by the MIT Press.</p>
<p>The answer, Richards claims, is sound. That is, the sounds of languages have hugely influenced their syntax. To a greater degree than has been the case, Richards believes, we need to integrate phonology — the study of sound in language — with syntax. Then we can better grasp why languages have their specific rules. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“The claim I’m making in this book is that our explanations should start with a careful explanation of the phonology and morphology,” Richards says. When studying syntax, he says, “We’ve been missing the deepest level of explanation by insisting that we not pay attention to morphology and phonology.”</p>
<p><strong>A tense situation</strong></p>
<p>With this in mind, consider the word-order difference again between English and French, versus Spanish and Italian. In Richards’ analysis, there is a deep relationship between the sounds of these sentences and grammar involving verb tenses. Languages in which the verb’s tense is expressed in its suffix must sometimes add other words in front of those verbs, for phonological reasons.</p>
<p>“That suffix needs to be preceded by something to which stress is reliably assigned,” Richards observes, referring to the syllables being accented by the speaker. “So [for] Spanish and Italian verb stress, you always get stress … before the tense suffix, but stress moves around in the verb, depending on the tense.”</p>
<p>Thus in Spanish, the verb “cantais,” meaning “you [plural] sing,” stresses the second syllable, but in the future tense it becomes “cantereis,” with stress on the third syllable. But English and French verbs do not have a similar sensitivity to tense: English verbs like “contain” and “contained” both have stress on the second syllable, while French verbs typically have stress on the last syllable. So the latter two languages can use a subject before the verb, which speakers can put stress on — like the word “it,” in the sentence, “It seems like French is hard.”</p>
<p>We can account in this way for the position of verbs in sentences, Richards says, almost universally. As he details in the book, the hypothesis holds up about 98 percent of the time when examined against the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database.</p>
<p>Similarly, Richards thinks, phonology and syntax interact in the area of what linguists call wh-movement, shifts in word order used to generate questions. Across a broad range of languages, he contends, there are universal conditions regulating the prosody — the exact pattern of intonations — of questions. This has implications for grammar.</p>
<p>In English, for instance, the universal conditions of question prosody result in a shuffle of words, when we turn a statement into a question. The sentence, “Steph shot a basketball,” can instead become, “What did Steph shoot?” In Japanese, by contrast, the word order does not have to change in the same way — but the intonation patterns do. In either case, the sounds we make and the syntax are bound together.</p>
<p><strong>Going deeper</strong></p>
<p>Other linguists believe Richards has made a valuable contribution by widening his argument about syntax and phonology.</p>
<p>Elisabeth Selkirk, a professor of linguistics emerita at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, calls Richards’ book a “bold attempt to derive classic syntactic movements from principles that require access to prosodic structure established early in the syntax.”</p>
<p>Richards, for his part, says he would be “delighted if people react to this [book] right now,” but he doesn’t expect to instantly convert most colleagues. He would like other scholars to consider his argument, however.</p>
<p>“If you observe a movement operation [shifting the positions of words in a sentence], that’s as far as you go in syntax right now,” Richards says. “There is a lot of interesting work and extremely fruitful work being done, but then we stop. The goal of this book is to make people feel bad when they do that.”</p>
<p>Richards also notes he would like “to apply the theory of this book to other languages and see if it survives, or which parts do.” In particular, having now tested his theory on Tagalog, a language commonly spoken in the Philippines that he has extensively studied, he is interested in seeing how well his ideas hold up in various other languages of the Philippines, many of which are closely related to Tagalog and differ from it grammatically in ways that are straightforward to isolate and test.</p>
<p>Moreover, Richards adds, among global languages, “There are other kinds of movement I don’t touch. It would be great to figure out how to get other kinds of movement operations under this same umbrella.”</p>
<p>Still, he thinks, syntactic analysis, for all its achievements, could become richer by consistently incorporating phonology.</p>
<p>“I’m trying to add another level of explanation,” Richards says.</p>
Norvin Richards, professor of linguistics at MIT, and the cover of his new book, “Contiguity Theory,” recently published by the MIT Press.Photo: Patrick GilloolyBooks and authors, Linguistics, Language, Social sciences, Research, Faculty, SHASSYour child, the literary talenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/faculty-profile-marah-gubar-0727
Literature professor Marah Gubar studies the creative powers of kids.Tue, 26 Jul 2016 23:59:59 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/faculty-profile-marah-gubar-0727<p>When author Ruth Krauss and illustrator Maurice Sendak collaborated on several acclaimed children’s books in the 1950s, such as “A Hole Is to Dig,” their ideas came, in part, from interviews Krauss had conducted with kids.</p>
<p>That might surprise some people, who may assume that adults writing for children draw primarily from their own imaginations. But it makes sense to Marah Gubar, an MIT professor who specializes in upending assumptions about children’s literature. Gubar’s research has uncovered a lost landscape of once-popular children’s literature and theater, in many cases written by women. She has also found that kids have often contributed to the creation of children’s books, as storytellers, correspondents, and more.</p>
<p>“Children’s literature is full of examples of people who were inspired by children,” Gubar says. But too often, she adds, people “take for granted that adults are the only ones participating in the production of children’s literature.”</p>
<p>Now Gubar, a faculty member in MIT’s literature program, has a new research project that extends this insight. Gubar is trying to isolate and compare some of the most common ways we think about the nature of childhood — work she hopes will speak to many people, including child development specialists, teachers, librarians, psychologists, and the general public.</p>
<p>“It really matters how adults think and talk about what it means to be a child,” Gubar says, noting that childhood “is not just biological; it’s also a social and cultural matter, so it changes over time, across cultures, and in different [social] classes.”</p>
<p>As Gubar sees it, adults in many societies often embrace a “difference model” or “deficit model” of children, which highlights the things kids cannot do. She favors another perspective, the “kinship model,” in which children and adults are regarded as having similar kinds of abilities. If a parent acts as if children are capable of doing something new — such as understanding poetry, Gubar suggests — they just might be able to.</p>
<p>“Even if my four-year-old probably wouldn’t like poetry, I would still give it a try, because by doing so, I’m treating him in a way that’s potentially enabling as opposed to disabling,” Gubar says. By contrast, she adds, when adults do not think children can comprehend new things, “That can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”</p>
<p>For her extensive published research and engaged teaching, MIT recruited Gubar to join its faculty in 2014; she had previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh.</p>
<p><strong>Rethinking the “Golden Age”</strong></p>
<p>Gubar’s path into academia was indirect, but logical in retrospect. At first she wanted to be an actor, and graduated from the University of Michigan with a double major in literature and performance studies. Before long, though, Gubar became impatient with the limited opportunities in acting.</p>
<p>“You really have to want to be an actor more than anything in the world to put up with that,” she observes. “I have so much respect for people who pound the pavement. But I realized that wasn’t me.”</p>
<p>Instead, Gubar attended Princeton University’s PhD program in literature. Entering academia had a familiar feel to it: Gubar grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, where her parents were both professors at Indiana University.</p>
<p>Her father, Edward Gubar, has taught writing, literature, and journalism. Her mother, Susan Gubar, is co-author (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of “The Madwoman in the Attic,” an influential 1979 work of feminist literary criticism illuminating the confined set of roles female characters had been assigned in canonical works of fiction, and the strategies women writers used to import social critiques into their own works.</p>
<p>In graduate school, Gubar at first intended to study Victorian literature but focused on children’s literature after taking a course with the scholar Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher.</p>
<p>“He taught a class on children’s literature, and it was inspirational,” Gubar says. Knoepflmacher encouraged Gubar to expand the research she had put into one paper, on Juliana Ewing, a Victorian children’s author who, among other things, coined the term “Brownies,” for young Girl Scouts. “He said, this is really good, you should develop it into something longer. That paper became the germ of my whole dissertation and ‘Artful Dodgers,’” Gubar adds, referencing her first book.</p>
<p>That work, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, examined Victorian children’s literature beyond its most famous stories, such as Lewis Carroll’s “Adventures in Alice in Wonderland.” Among Gubar’s conclusions were that dramatists and female authors played a key role in making the Victorian era a “golden age” for children’s literature; and that the Victorians did not just depict children through a Romantic lens as unsullied innocents, but understood children to be complex and capable beings.</p>
<p><strong>The very busy scholar</strong></p>
<p>Like her mentors, Gubar takes pride in being an engaged teacher, not just a scholar. In fact, those two parts of her job interact: Children’s literature professors, being few in number, have to teach broadly across historical eras and places, which helps Gubar think broadly about research.</p>
<p>“Undergraduate teaching has completely shaped the trajectory of my research,” Gubar says.</p>
<p>Some of Gubar’s writing is also directed explicitly toward a general audience, including essays she has written recently at the site Public Books. In one such 2014 piece, Gubar explored the theme of kids’ abilities in the award-winning 1967 E.L. Konigsburg book, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”</p>
<p>“Konigsburg was committed to depicting young people as capable knowers of what goes on in their own minds, homes, and the wider world they inhabit,” Gubar writes of the story, in which two siblings run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and try to solve a mystery about a sculpture’s origins. “‘The Mixed-Up Files’ isn’t really about running away. It’s about how different people feel about knowledge.”</p>
<p>Gubar’s current book project is drawing heavily upon such modern sources to survey the ways adults have thought about the abilities of children. She hopes the eventual result will be read well beyond academia.</p>
<p>“I think we need a model for thinking about what it means to be a child that is simple enough that we can share it with all kinds of people,” Gubar says. “It would be great if we could share the insights we have beyond the academy and make it something people can use in their daily lives.”</p>
“It really matters how adults think and talk about what it means to be a child,” says literature professor Marah Gubar, noting that childhood “is not just biological; it’s also a social and cultural matter, so it changes over time, across cultures, and in different [social] classes.”
Photo: Bryce VickmarkLiterature, languages and writing, Faculty, Books and authors, Women, Research, education, Education, teaching, academicsMarket makershttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-good-emissions-trading-programs-unique-0726
Good emissions trading programs are unique, not one-size-fits-all, new book argues.Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-good-emissions-trading-programs-unique-0726<p>Climate change is a global problem — but its solution relies on national, regional, and local policy actions. Take the issue of greenhouse gas emissions markets, which put a price on, say, the amount of carbon a country can release into the atmosphere.</p>
<p>There are about 45 substantial climate-focused markets around the world, including some operating within parts of a single country, such as California’s cap-and-trade program. But 195 countries developed the Paris Agreement in 2015 to reduce emissions. Can the trading schemes used in one place be readily adopted by others?</p>
<p>Not really, according to Janelle Knox-Hayes, a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, because markets do not just naturally spring into existence wherever deals can be made; instead, they are painstakingly crafted by institutions.</p>
<p>“Maybe markets are an important piece of the solution,” says Knox-Hayes. “But markets aren’t one-size-fits-all.”</p>
<p>Knox-Hayes takes a deep look at the issue in a new book, “The Cultures of Markets: The Political Economy of Climate Governance,” published this month by Oxford University Press. Her examination illuminates the basic tension between the international and national aspects of the climate issue. Whereas experts once sought “supranational control” of policy, as she writes, national-level policies have become a much more feasible route to climate progress in recent years.</p>
<p>“There is a desire to see climate change as a universal problem with a universal solution,” Knox-Hayes says. “Competing with that is the reality of what’s required to build markets. They’re not just economic institutions. They’re sociopolitical, they’re cultural, and they have a range of different norms and aspirations that drive their development.”</p>
<p><strong>Going global</strong></p>
<p>To write the book, Knox-Hayes spent years studying climate regulations globally and interviewed about 275 policy and market makers around the world. Her study looks closely at six countries or regions that have adopted climate markets of various kinds: the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and China.</p>
<p>To see how emissions markets can vary, consider that in the U.S., financial firms have long been involved the construction of emissions markets. As a result, nearly a decade ago, before the financial-markets crisis, it was already possible to trade collateralized carbon obligations, a type of security akin to the collateralized debt obligation derived from the real-estate lending markets.</p>
<p>“The reason is the emissions markets were being built by the financial institutions that operate every other market,” says Knox-Hayes.</p>
<p>But in Japan, by contrast, climate markets have had a distinctly lesser emphasis on financialization. After its Fukushima nuclear-power disaster in 2011, the country created a program in which exports of clean technology to other countries counted as offsets against its own emissions.</p>
<p>This reflected a “core value of materiality” in the Japanese economy, Knox-Hayes says. “It’s one of the cases where there’s an incredible skepticism of finance,” she observes. “You see in the [market] mechanism this emphasis on the material economy. They see the core of their economy in heavy industry, heavy manufacturing.”</p>
<p>And then there are the different political circumstances in which emissions markets emerge, which also vary greatly. In the U.S., Knox-Hayes notes, carbon trading followed in the wake of a successful trading program set up to reduce acid rain, but it took market form also because of deeply entrenched attitudes in which markets are “seen as less onerous than other forms of regulation,” as the book states.</p>
<p>In Japan, the acute Fukushima crisis transformed energy and climate policies, while in China, Knox-Hayes says, “The motivating factor has been chronic environmental crisis,” which, she adds, is an important issue relating to “the stability of the one-party system” in the country.</p>
<p>And while these differing market systems might have different levels of effectiveness over time, Knox-Hayes suggests this variation might be beneficial, by providing more types of models for other countries to follow.</p>
<p>“One of the takeaways is, at the international level, we need to build more flexibility in the creation of policy,” Knox-Hayes suggests.</p>
<p><strong>Trading material</strong></p>
<p>Knox-Hayes’ book has received a positive reception from other scholars. Donald MacKenzie, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh who has written widely on technology and markets, calls the book a “vital contribution to a crucial debate,” while Gordon Clark of Oxford University says it is “essential reading for academics, policy makers, and those of us committed to making a difference in the future.”</p>
<p>For her part, Knox-Hayes says she hopes readers will also engage in the book’s concluding discussion about what she calls the “materiality of environmental markets,” that is, the issue of how many kinds of financial instruments should be used within emissions trading.</p>
<p>Consider again the financial crash of the last decade, in which the amount of money tied up in derivatives (side bets) based on subprime lending, in some institutions, far exceeded the value of the lending itself. Building a system like that around environmental factors, Knox-Hayes suggests, could also create unwanted market instabilities. In short, while emissions markets have their place, she thinks, their primary goal — helping tackle climate change — should not be usurped by financial innovation. That is, perhaps, one universal feature such markets need to share.</p>
<p>“The nature of the value held in a derivative is different from the nature of the value held in a commodity,” Knox-Hayes says. “We need to place limits on the degree to which we extend value.”</p>
“The Cultures of Markets: The Political Economy of Climate Governance,” by Janelle Knox-Hayes (pictured), published by Oxford University Press.
School of Architecture and Planning, Books and authors, Faculty, Climate change, Urban studies and planning, Energy, Environment, Emissions, Politics, Policy, Renewable energy, PollutionCities of tomorrowhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-cities-tomorrow-urban-design-0705
New book by Senseable City Lab researchers presents vision of data-driven urban design.Tue, 05 Jul 2016 11:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-cities-tomorrow-urban-design-0705<p>Cities can be confusing, messy places. Traffic jams make it hard to get around. Public transit can be puzzling. Trash piles up. So what can make cities function better?</p>
<p>One starting point is to let all that apparent chaos speak to us — in the form of data. At least, that is the approach taken by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, where for a decade now, researchers have been using networked data to create pictures of cities in motion: how traffic and people move, where trash goes, and more.</p>
<p>Those projects have produced intriguing results, on the flow of people in European cities, the disposal of trash in the U.S., and commuting habits and patterns of mobile-phone use on four continents. Some have had a discernible impact: A 2009 project tracking trash in Seattle, for example, has led to greater public awareness and ongoing inquiry into disposal practices.</p>
<p>Beyond any one issue, however, Senseable City members have become outspoken advocates for use of network-based data to inform policy and planning in urban life.</p>
<p>“The important thing is to think about how we can try to better understand urban dynamics, and how can we use this to create a city that is really under control of the citizens,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab, and a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).</p>
<p>Now Ratti and DUSP Phd student Matthew Claudel have outlined that vision by co-writing a new book, “The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life,” published this week by Yale University Press.</p>
<p><strong>Human experience</strong></p>
<p>As an overview, “The City of Tomorrow” is a far-ranging survey of urban-planning topics including transport, energy, architecture, social networks, and much more. Ratti and Claudel emphasize how networked technologies allow us to study cities in ways that were not possible decades ago.</p>
<p>“The Internet is becoming the Internet of things,” Ratti says, in an interview at his MIT office. “That really has changed a lot. When we started more than 10 years ago, this [kind of] research was more underground. … It has become much more present on the agenda of many mayors.”</p>
<p>The lab’s 2006 projects in Rome, for instance, carried out in conjunction with telecom companies and the city’s administration, allowed Senseable City researchers to study the flow of people in relation to bus traffic. In theory, that could help planners optimize bus routes to best meet demand, based on people’s everyday needs.</p>
<p>“Our starting point is usually human experience,” Ratti says. “The important thing is not to start with the technology; it’s how the technology can affect lives. If you start with the human experience, you can see traffic, you can see social connections, and more.”</p>
<p>Alternately, consider a recent Senseable City project, from 2014, showing how people evaluate their commuting options on four continents. The published study revealed that in four distinct urban areas — Boston; Lisbon, Portugal; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Abidjan, Ivory Coast — people place an upper limit on what they will tolerate for their commutes based on the time involved, more than the distance. Theoretically, planners could apply this insight to public rapid transit design.</p>
<p><strong>What kind of “future” is useful?</strong></p>
<p>Michael Batty, a professor of planning at University College London, says the lab has provided “remarkable insights” and calls the “The City of Tomorrow” a book “that everyone who is interested in the future … should explore.”</p>
<p>As it happens, the book was written in part to outline Senseable City Lab’s conception of the relationship between the “future” and planning. Grandiose visions of the far-distant future, he thinks, are of limited value; the book begins by noting a 1900 prediction, published in <em>The Boston Globe</em>, contending that in a century, the city would have moving sidewalks, pneumatic tubes, airships, and no slums.</p>
<p>By contrast, the Senseable City approach looks to make more modest changes based on recent data and existing patterns of urban activity. The “City of Tomorrow,” in Ratti’s view, is much closer to being, in fact, the city of tomorrow.</p>
<p>In their book, the authors unveil a neologism for this approach: “future-crafting,” that is, designing interventions and experimental projects that explore what city life could be like this year or next if we made some adjustments based on our current capabilities. That might mean more efficient transit, better trash disposal, or smarter buildings, but nothing that should seem unfathomable to us at present.</p>
<p>“Usually it’s quite futile to try to predict the future,” Ratti concludes. “But what we can do is look at the options we have today and explore those options, so we can have a more informed discussion about where we can go. It should be a collaborative process. I hope this book helps in that process somehow.”</p>
“The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life” (Yale University Press), co-written by Carlo Ratti (pictured), director of the Senseable City Lab and a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.Photo: Lars KrügerTransportation, Cities, Big data, Books and authors, Faculty, Networks, Social networks, internet of things, Sensors, Urban studies and planning, School of Architecture and PlanningGroovy science, man!https://news.mit.edu/2016/q-a-david-kaiser-science-countercultural-turn-0629
Q&amp;A: David Kaiser on our debt to science’s countercultural turn.Wed, 29 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/q-a-david-kaiser-science-countercultural-turn-0629<p><em>When science met the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, unusual things happened. The medical researcher John Lilly studied whether dolphins could learn human language. Would-be astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky made widely read claims that a comet had caused biblical disasters. But other projects have had lasting legacies: Artisanal food makers founded organic farms, designers built communes with sustainable housing, and materials scientists even revolutionized surfboard manufacturing. All this and more is featured in “Groovy Science,” a new book from the University of Chicago Press featuring essays from 17 scholars about science’s countercultural turn. The volume was co-edited by David Kaiser, head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, whose own 2011 book, “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” detailed the counterculture’s influence on once-marginal physics questions such as entanglement. (The other co-editor, W. Patrick McCray, is an historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara.) </em>MIT News<em> donned a wide-collar shirt and sat down with Kaiser to talk about “Groovy Science.” </em></p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> What is the conventional wisdom about science you are trying to revise?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> We want to address a common stereotype that dates from the time period itself, which is that the American youth movement, the hippies or counterculture, was reacting strongly against science and technology, or even the entire Western intellectual tradition of reason, as a symbol of all that should be overturned. In fact, many of them were enamored of science and technology, some of them were working scientists, and some were patrons of science. This picture of fear and revulsion is wrong.</p>
<p>We also see things that have a surprisingly psychedelic past. This includes certain strains of sustainability, design, and manufacture, notions of socially responsible engineering, and artisanal food. This stuff didn’t start from scratch in 1968 and didn’t end on a dime in 1982.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> The post-war era is known for industrial-scale “Big Science,” in defense research, particle physics, space exploration, and more. But this book features a lot of “small” science, from labs, early start-ups, farms, and communes. How consciously were scientists reacting against “Big Science”?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> It was almost an ideological shift. These folks were rejecting not science itself but what many had come to consider a depersonalized, militarized approach to the control of nature. Yet even the most colorful examples of groovy science had specific debts to the High Cold War, the first quarter-century after World War II, the era of “Big Science.” John Lilly was famous for woolly-sounding experiments on interspecies communication [with dolphins] and sensory deprivation and LSD. It’s easy to see why that fits in a book called “Groovy Science,” but Lilly was coming directly out of military-industrial research, from Korean War-era worries about brainwashing and the Soviet Menace. The chapter on the surfboard revolution takes us far away from Dr. Strangelove — we’re not talking about nuclear strategy or bombers — but this happened in Southern California for a reason, because there were a lot of people in defense and aerospace with experience in materials science, which shaped even a leisure/counterculture activity such as surfing.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Surfing is largely a middle-class activity. And the U.S. had a postwar, middle-class economic boom into the late 1960s or early 1970s. How much “groovy science” was middle-class science, serving middle-class pursuits, among people who could afford to drop out?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> The affluence question was on the minds of many of these people. But the era of so-called stagflation [starting in the early 1970s] was highly disruptive. And that did inspire efforts for what we now call sustainability. What would it take to avoid the trap of consumerism and planned obsolescence? Energy and the environment were getting a huge reboot of attention among tuned-in young people in this time period.</p>
<p>Many of these people really thought the revolution was nigh. They thought the basic structure of society was about to come in for enormous change, and could imagine new roles for themselves and the work they loved doing. Their horizons seemed broader, in a very hopeful way.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> You’ve written about the counterculture and physics before, so what new things did you learn from your colleagues here?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> You start seeing commonalities across fields that seem distinct, from psychology to engineering, public health, medical practices, and ecology. There is a common theme of a “conversion narrative,” a personal quest for authenticity [among scientists]. You might call it a kind of secular spiritualism.</p>
<p>You also start seeing the role of the guru or charismatic figure. Some of them were iconic countercultural figures. Psychologist Timothy Leary [who advocated using psychedelic drugs in therapy] was enamored of everything from quantum physics to aerospace engineering. He got plenty of things wrong and said outlandish things, but he wasn’t rejecting the legacy of science. He was trying to push it toward broader horizons. A lot of people associated with health and medicine had earnest questions about the nature of consciousness. They might make us chuckle today, but it was driven by a desire to know.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> One chapter of this book is about the psychologist Abraham Maslow, whose work on “self-actualization” was massively popular, but even as he visited the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, he seemed wary of the counterculture. Timothy Leary aside, doesn’t it seem like a lot of famous 1960s figures were not really into 1960s culture? &nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> I agree. Maslow was fascinated enough to try to engage directly with students, at Brandeis, in California, and across the country. But he maintained a strong ambivalence, even as much of his writing was adopted and celebrated by younger people. Immanuel Velikovsky was temperamentally a polar opposite from many people who considered themselves his acolytes. He was a very bookish Eastern European émigré who pursued unusual ideas, but with a 19th century European scholar’s identity in mind, even as he became an unintentional pied piper for college kids from across the country.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> It’s great reading about the 1960s and 1970s, but does this book tell us anything we can apply to science and culture today?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> I would like the book to inspire discussion about broader cultural attitudes toward science and technology. We’re living through a remarkably challenging period today about the place of scientific expertise in policy debates. It’s easy for us to dismiss entire swaths of the population as antiscience. In some instances that might be accurate, but we can move away from a simple binary [division] of “us” and “them.” The ways scientific expertise can take shape within our culture can be messy, and can change.</p>
“Groovy Science,” from the University of Chicago Press, was co-edited by David Kaiser (pictured), head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.Photo: Donna CoveneySHASS, Technology and society, Books and authors, History, 3 Questions, Program in STSPowered by literature on her way toward an MDhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/powered-by-literature-cara-lai-0601
Senior Cara Lai cites MIT Literature studies as key to her preparation for medical practice.
Wed, 01 Jun 2016 17:00:01 -0400School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/powered-by-literature-cara-lai-0601<p>When she first arrived at MIT, a freshman in 2012, Cara Lai was focused on engineering studies. But it wasn't long before Lai discovered that the breadth and depth of an MIT education is designed to help students explore new fields, discover connections between disciplines, and find their callings.<br />
<br />
As a result, Lai will graduate this week with a double major — in both literature and mechanical engineering — and next fall will enter the Stanford University School of Medicine. There she will draw deeply on what she learned in MIT's science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and humanities classes — most especially, she says, studies in MIT Literature, which provided her with tools critical to the practice of medicine.</p>
<p><strong>Medicine and the experience of being human</strong></p>
<p>"The body is in many ways a machine; it experiences wear and tear, has complex systems coupled together in specific interactions, and occasionally needs parts replaced," says Lai. "But, in very obvious ways humans are not machines, and that's where the humanities come in. The study of literature is about the experience of being human, and that's inseparable from the practice of medicine."</p>
<p>While Lai knew she would get an excellent engineering education at the Institute, she was initially concerned that her love of literature could be short-changed. "I felt like I might be giving up something coming to MIT because I was very interested in literature. But that did not turn out to be at all the case,” she says. "MIT's humanities programs are just stellar."</p>
<p><strong>Discovering the doctor-patient relationship</strong></p>
<p>At first, Lai pursued literature at MIT as a personal passion. She declared a major in mechanical engineering and prepared for a career working on medical devices — an interest she developed in high school while competing on a FIRST Robotics team. Her team was sponsored by Intuitive Surgical, which introduced her to the Da Vinci robotic surgical system, and that in turn inspired her interest in medical engineering.</p>
<p>Then, during MIT's Independent Activities Period in her sophomore year, Lai got the chance to shadow John Lamberti, an MIT alumnus and chief of the Cardiovascular Surgery Division at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. It was during that time that she discovered she really wanted to treat patients. "I think there will always be something about the doctor-patient relationship that's sacred," she says. "That's why I'm doing this instead of medical devices."</p>
<p><strong>Interpreting patients' stories </strong></p>
<p>While medicine requires a great deal of technical skill, Lai notes that it's also a field in which human context deeply matters — who the patient is, where he or she came from, and who the family members are. "People expect medicine to be black and white," she observes, "like engineering. Engineering is super black and white. If you have to make a tough decision, you weigh numbers against each other. But medicine isn't always that way."</p>
<p>Medicine is about human relationships, and building relationships requires an ability to empathize with patients — even those who come from very different backgrounds. That's where literature provides critical support, Lai says. "In fiction, great authors craft characters who are people — you can inhabit their lives. You start to empathize with them. In life, you can then draw these connections," she says.</p>
<p>Since doctors have little time to learn about their patients, it is very useful to develop an understanding of how stories work, Lai says. "What is the truth? How do you interpret someone's story? These questions get asked all the time in medicine — and they are also asked all the time in literature."</p>
<p><strong>Literature as an enduring source</strong></p>
<p>Double-majoring in mechanical engineering and literature — while simultaneously fulfilling pre-med requirements — kept Lai busy with classes, but she also participated in other opportunities at MIT. She spent half of her junior year at Oxford University in England studying Victorian literature, and went to Spain to study Spanish literature on a <a href="http://shass.mit.edu/undergraduate/scholarships/kelly-douglas" target="_blank">Kelly-Douglas Traveling Fellowship</a>.</p>
<p>Going forward, Lai says she plans to continue her study of literature at Stanford because she enjoys the "layers of perspective" she gains from reading and sharing insights with professors and fellow students. "There's so much you can learn from books. It never ends," she says.</p>
<h5><br />
<em>Story prepared by SHASS Communications<br />
Editorial Team: Emily Hiestand and Kathryn O'Neill</em></h5>
Cara Lai, MIT Class of 2016, is double-majoring in literature and mechanical engineering. Photo: Jon Sachs/MIT-SHASS CommunicationsStudents, Profile, Health, Health care, Literature, Mechanical engineering, Medicine, Undergraduate, SHASS, School of EngineeringDavid Corcoran named associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2016/david-corcoran-named-associate-director-knight-science-journalism-program-0527
Former science editor at &lt;i&gt;The New York Times&lt;/i&gt; will assume his KSJ duties in July.Fri, 27 May 2016 13:00:01 -0400Knight Science Journalism Program at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2016/david-corcoran-named-associate-director-knight-science-journalism-program-0527<p>The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that David Corcoran, longtime editor of Science Times, the weekly science section of <em>The New York Times,</em> will be joining the KSJ team as its first associate director. His tenure begins in July.</p>
<p>“We are thrilled to have David join the KSJ staff in such an important and visible role,” said program director and Pulitzer prizewinning science journalist Deborah Blum. “He brings with him an international reputation for excellence, emphasizing our mission of both supporting and illuminating the profession of science journalism."</p>
<p>In his capacity as associate director, Corcoran will play a pivotal role in helping to manage KSJ's acclaimed fellowship —&nbsp;an elite, mid-career program that lures prominent science journalists from around the world for nine months of study and intellectual exploration at MIT, Harvard University, and other area institutions. He will also assist in story development and serve as a senior editor and podcast host for KSJ's recently launched online science magazine, <em>Undark </em>—&nbsp;an expansion of the expertise he has already lent to the magazine on a freelance basis since its debut in late February.</p>
<p>Corcoran spent nearly 30 years at <em>The New York Times,</em> where he held a number of roles, including education editor and deputy op-ed editor. After joining the <em>Times' </em>science desk, he pioneered the successful Science Times podcast —&nbsp;an experience that led him to suggest launching a similar program for <em>Undark. </em>The magazine's editor and former KSJ fellow, Tom Zeller Jr., gladly took him up on the idea and made him host.</p>
<p>"David was the editor who gave me my first byline when I arrived at <em>The New York Times</em> as a cub reporter nearly 20 years ago," Zeller said. "I've seen and experienced his keen storytelling sensibilities, deft editing, and journalistic smarts first-hand, so I feel incredibly lucky that we'll have him in-house full-time as both a mentor for the fellows, and a hired hand on our new magazine."</p>
<p>Corcoran said his work with <em>Undark</em> helped to convince him that joining the program would be an excellent move.</p>
<p>“I was very impressed with the energy and commitment of Deborah and Tom to the new magazine, and they had me up to visit the fellowship program and speak to the fellows and I was very taken with them," Corcoran said, adding: "It just seemed like a great fit for me."</p>
<p>In addition to his work at <em>The New York Times,</em> Corcoran recently edited “<em>The New York Times</em> Book of Science," a compilation of 125 of the finest examples of newspaper science coverage culled from over 150 years of <em>The New York Times'</em> archives. Corcoran is also an avid runner and published poet, with work featured in both Podium and Barrow Street. Poetry, art, and visual storytelling are important to Corcoran —&nbsp;all reasons he says he felt drawn to KSJ and <em>Undark.</em></p>
<p>“This is what we were trying to do with Science Times, is to make it a compelling experience in every way,” he said. “I was always very concerned with the photography and the illustrations and the graphics that we presented — they add so much value to a story.”</p>
<p>Corcoran plans to arrive in Cambridge in early July —&nbsp;just ahead of the mid-August arrival of a new crop of fellows, who are themselves descending on MIT from all four corners of the U.S., as well as France, Italy, Mexico, and Kenya.</p>
<p>“I can’t wait to get started," Corcoran said.&nbsp;</p>
David CorcoranKnight fellowship, Staff, Science writing, Science communications, SHASSJulie Shah, Sandy Alexandre receive campus houseteam appointmentshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/julie-shah-sandy-alexandre-receive-houseteam-appointments-0526
Shah named head of house after serving as Sidney Pacific associate housemaster; Alexandre joins East Campus as associate head of house.Thu, 26 May 2016 17:48:01 -0400Division of Student Lifehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/julie-shah-sandy-alexandre-receive-houseteam-appointments-0526<p>The Sidney Pacific graduate and East Campus undergraduate communities have a new head of house and associate head of house, respectively.</p>
<p>Julie Shah '04 SM '06, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been appointed head of house for Sydney Pacific (SP) after serving with her husband, Neel, as associate housemasters since 2013. Julie holds bachelor’s (2004) and master’s (2006) degrees from MIT, she and completed her PhD in 2011. Neel is a physician, a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University, and is a practicing obstetrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The Shahs take on their new role after previous housemasters Andreas Schultz and Berit Johannes departed MIT for an appointment in their native Germany last year. They had been housemasters since 2013.</p>
<p>“Transitioning to heads of house has been easy for us,” says Julie Shah. “After two years in SP, including a year as the interim housemasters, both the role and the community are integrated with our lives.” In fact, the Shahs dedication to supporting MIT students dates back to their days as graduate residence tutors (GRTs) in Baker House.</p>
<p>“Sidney Pacific is really incredible. The students hooked us early on, right from our interview for the associate housemaster role,” Julie says. “In my entire academic career, I’ve never seen a committee as well-run as that search committee. Right off the bat we were impressed with the residents’ thoughtfulness, organization, and community spirit.”</p>
<p>That spirit has been tested recently as SP’s HVAC system undergoes renovation. The work closed down one half of the building starting in August 2015, then the other this past January. “The student government handled this tough situation very well,” Julie says. “They prepared for closure and contraction of residents. Now they’re doing a great job preparing for the expansion, and welcoming students back into the community this summer.”</p>
<p>Across campus, associate professor of literature Sandy Alexandre began her new appointment as East Campus (EC) associate head of house in March. Alexandre is a faculty member in literature within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). According to <a href="http://lit.mit.edu/people/salexandre/" target="_blank">her SHASS biography</a>, Alexandre’s research focuses on “Black-American literature and culture, race and visual studies, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, and material culture studies.”</p>
<p>“After being awarded tenure, I reached a stage in my life where I found it necessary to tailor how exactly I wanted to belong and contribute to MIT as a community,” Alexandre said. “Tenure is huge and I wanted to make it more manageable by being more reflective about how I’m situating myself as a colleague, professor, and community member. The end result of that reflection was deciding that I wanted to make sure I not only kept my fingers on the pulse of the lives and struggles of the undergraduate population, but that I also helped to strengthen that community.”</p>
<p>Alexandre added a musical analogy. “You could say that I came to a Whitney Houston moment of believing the children are the future but also wanting to be proactive about practicing that belief outside the confines of the classroom,” she said. “A lot of life is lived and a lot of thinking hatches outside the classroom, and I wanted to be a part of cultivating those things somehow.”</p>
<p>Alexandre will move into EC later this year, but the process of connecting with residents has already started. “I have been attending EC houseteam meetings and host office hours every Friday. I listen, talk with them, offer perspectives as they share about their own lives,” she said. “It’s as educational for me as I hope it is for them. Even in this short time I’ve learned something new: how to grill burgers! I was at the grills for [Campus Preview Weekend] and had never grilled a burger a day in my life.”</p>
<p>And Alexandre is all about building community. “At MIT we build amazing technology, better and better machines. At the same time, great communities enable people to interact and learn from one another, and that adds purpose to life,” she said. “I’m very excited to help build community in EC, because it’s an important way of ensuring that we have a brighter future.”</p>
<p>Heads of house (previously known as housemasters) at MIT are faculty who reside in the undergraduate and graduate residential halls and fill an important role in each house’s community. Part advisor and advocate, part mentor and neighbor, heads of house work closely with their area director, graduate resident tutors, their house’s student government, and the Division of Student Life to advise students, provide leadership for the house, and foster community life at the Institute.</p>
<p>“The Institute is fortunate to have the Shahs, experienced and knowledgeable about their community, ready to move into the Sidney Pacific head of house role,” says Chris Colombo, dean for student life and head of house in Next House. “At the same time, I’m delighted that Sandy Alexandre has agreed to take on the associate head of house role in East Campus as her first experience of live-in student support. Being a head of house is a tough job, and I have no doubt Sandy will be a terrific addition to the EC community.”</p>
Left: Sandy Alexandre began her appointment as East Campus associate head of house in March. Right: Neel and Julie Shah, who have been appointed heads of house for Sidney Pacific.Photos: Alexandre by Bryce Vickmark; Shahs courtesy of Julie Shah.Faculty, Student life, Residential life, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), SHASS, School of Engineering, Aeronautical and astronautical engineering, LiteratureKnight Science Journalism Program selects fellowship class of 2016-17https://news.mit.edu/2016/knight-science-journalism-program-selects-new-fellowship-class-0502
Ten journalists have been selected to join the KSJ Program at MIT, a global fellowship program for journalists covering science, technology, health, and the environment.Mon, 02 May 2016 12:00:01 -0400Knight Science Journalism Program at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2016/knight-science-journalism-program-selects-new-fellowship-class-0502<p>The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT (KSJ), a global fellowship program for journalists covering science, technology, health, and the environment, has announced that 10 journalists, representing five countries, have been selected to join the program’s 34th class of fellows.</p>
<p>The KSJ Class of 2016-17 includes journalists with award-winning backgrounds across a range of media platforms — radio, television, newspapers, magazines, online publications, and books — and they come to Cambridge from across the United States, and from France, Italy, Kenya, and Mexico.</p>
<p>As in previous years, the 2016-17 finalists were selected from a large and highly competitive pool of applicants. This year’s selection committee was comprised of KSJ program director Deborah Blum; former acting director Wade Roush; Tom Zeller, editor of <a href="http://undark.org/">Undark</a>, the popular digital science magazine published by KSJ; and Robert Lee Hotz, a senior science writer with <em>The Wall Street Journal.</em></p>
<p>The new Knight fellows will begin nine months of study and exploration this fall. In addition to a private seminar series, training workshops and field trips, fellows will have the opportunity to study and audit courses at MIT, Harvard University, and other institutions in the Greater Boston area. For first time, fellows will also develop original projects during their time in Cambridge — from feature stories and short films to podcasts and photo essays — which will be showcased at&nbsp;<a href="http://undark.org/" target="_blank">Undark.org</a>.</p>
<p>The KSJ Class of 2016-17 includes:</p>
<p><strong>Iván Carrillo Pérez</strong>&nbsp;is a science journalist in Mexico City with a background both in print and television. He has been a contributor to <em>National Geographic Magazine LA, Newsweek Magazine en Español,</em> CCN en Español (TV), and SPR News (TV), among others. He holds a position as anchor of Los Observadores, a national television program exploring scientific innovation. From 2005 to 2015 he was the editor of <em>Quo, </em>a magazine dedicated to the dissemination of science and technology.</p>
<p><strong>Chloe Hecketsweiler</strong>&nbsp;is a Paris-based journalist with the French newspaper <em>Le Monde. </em>Writing mainly for the business section, she has specialized in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Her stories, both national and international, highlight the intersection between science, business, and society, investigating, for example, the impact of drug pricing on the health care system, or the financial relationships between doctors and big pharmaceutical groups.</p>
<p><strong>Rosalia Omungo</strong>&nbsp;is a television journalist and editor for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi, where she leads the features, health, and environment desks. She has focused on a wide range of topics including climate change policy, energy, biotechnology, biodiversity, and water issues. Her work has also appeared in <em>Science Africa.</em> She was the first Earth Journalism Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she spent spring semester in 2014 studying journalism and environmental science.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Robert McClure</strong>&nbsp;is the executive director of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom in Seattle with a focus on the environment, public health, and government accountability, and a track record of change-making journalism. A veteran newspaper reporter, McClure has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from Columbia University. In 2013, he was named as one of <em>Seattle Magazine’s</em> “most influential” people in the city. A Florida native, McClure started his career at United Press International in Miami.</p>
<p><strong>Maura R. O’Connor</strong>&nbsp;is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn and writes about the politics and ethics of science, technology and conservation. Her work has appeared online in <em>The Atavist, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Nautilus,</em> and <em>Harper’s. </em>Her first book, “Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things,” was named one of Library Journal and Amazon’s Best Books of 2015. She is currently at work on a second book, an exploration of navigation traditions, neuroscience, and human relationships to space, time, and memory.</p>
<p><strong>Meera Subramanian</strong>&nbsp;is a freelance journalist based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, whose work has been published in <em>The New York Times, The New Yorker, Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion,</em> and other national and international publications. She is the author of the acclaimed 2015 book, “A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka”. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Women’s Travel Writing.</p>
<p><strong>Bianca Vázquez Toness</strong>, a journalist based in Cambridge, writes about technology and its impact on people. She most recently covered India’s technology and telecommunications industries for Bloomberg News in New Delhi. She also explored agriculture, renewable energy, and that country’s obsession with engineering. Before moving to India, she reported for a range of outlets, including WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Yakima Herald-Republic. She began her career as a journalist covering issues in Mexico.</p>
<p><strong>Fabio Turone</strong>&nbsp;is a science writer and editor based in Milan, Italy. He contributes to several Italian outlets, including <em>L’Espresso, Panorama, Il Corriere della sera, Il Sole 24 Ore, Wired</em> magazine, and the <em>British Medical Journal.</em> Since 2012, he has served as director of the Erice International School of Science Journalism, a summer program in Sicily. He launched and currently heads the professional association, Science Writers in Italy, with the aim of promoting international exchanges and collaboration.</p>
<p><strong>Lauren M. Whaley</strong>&nbsp;is a California-based journalist specializing in health care policy related to mental illness, children, and pregnant women. She has contributed stories to KQED Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, <em>The San Jose Mercury News, </em>and <em>The New York Times</em> and was an award-winning multimedia journalist for the CHCF Center for Health Reporting. She is a past president of the national journalism organization Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS).</p>
<p><strong>Mark Wolverton</strong>&nbsp;is a Philadelphia-based freelancer, who writes about technology and history for publications including <em>Wired</em> magazine, <em>Scientific American, </em>American Heritage’s <em>Invention and Technology, Popular Science, Psychology Today,</em> and <em>Air and Space Smithsonian.</em> He is the author of three books: “A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (2008); “The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes” (2004); and “The Science of Superman” (2002). He is also a dramatist whose work has been presented on stages across the country and on national radio.</p>
The Knight Science Journalism Program Class of 2016-17 includes journalists with backgrounds across a range of media platforms who will come to MIT from across the United States, and from France, Italy, Kenya, and Mexico.Knight fellowship, Science writing, Science communications, Awards, honors and fellowships, Journalism, SHASS3 Questions: Alan Brody on “Small Infinities”https://news.mit.edu/2016/3-questions-alan-brody-small-infinities-0407
As part of MIT 2016 celebration, play about Isaac Newton debuts in U.S.Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/3-questions-alan-brody-small-infinities-0407<p><em>You may have read books about Isaac Newton. But have you ever seen a play about him? Now is your chance. The MIT 2016 celebrations, commemorating the Institute’s 100th year in Cambridge, include the U.S. debut of “Small Infinities,” a work by MIT professor of theater Alan Brody. The play explores the “life and paradox” of Newton and is among many produced works written by Brody, who has won awards for plays such as “Invention for Fathers and Sons” and “The Company of Angels,” among others. “Small Infinities” will be performed at the Kresge Little Theater, April 7-9 and 14-16, at 7:30 pm. MIT News recently talked to Brody about the play. </em></p>
<p><strong>Q.</strong> What is “Small Infinities” about?</p>
<p><strong>A.</strong> It’s about Isaac Newton. And one of the things that always fascinated me about him was that he had an absolutely medieval mind. At the same time, he was the father of modern science. And that juxtaposition seemed to me to be really interesting. That’s what I started to explore as I wrote the play. There are so many contradictions in his mind. He was also a very, very difficult person.</p>
<p>One of the difficulties of writing a play like this is to go back into the mindset of an entire culture. And the culture of the 17th century was very, very different. The questions about God particularly had a different power in the 17th century than they do today. And I think that “my” Newton, and I have to call him that, not only believed in God deeply but believed he was doing God’s work and that he was God’s chosen [servant] to do his work. His mathematical mind was God-given and he had to serve God with it. Yet what he did was engender doubt about God in the first place.</p>
<p><strong>Q.</strong> What are some of the ideas you’d like the audience to be thinking about as they walk out of the play?</p>
<p><strong>A.</strong> I think the big thing is that we create heroes and dehumanize them. And one of my interests is to take historical figures, who have been canonized in one way or another, and begin to examine them as human beings, and see what emerges when that happens. And I think the contradictions I was talking about before are among them. There are other surprising things that [I have] imagined [about Newton] — not out of thin air, but that [others have] speculated about — in his personal relationships, and those are very much part of the play too.</p>
<p><strong>Q.</strong> This is the U.S. debut of the play (which was once performed in India). Why is it being staged here?</p>
<p><strong>A.</strong> This play and the first reading of it was really part of the beginning of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT. And that’s the collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater and the Nora Theater Company — which are both part of the Central Square Theater. The idea is that we find the best possible plays or theater pieces about science, and make them available, not just to MIT but to the entire community, Cambridge and Boston. The movement toward plays about science is very important to us. Cambridge is just an ideal place for this event to be happening.</p>
“Small Infinities,” written by professor Alan Brody (pictured) will be performed at the Kresge Little Theater, April 7-9 and 14-16, at 7:30 pm. Courtesy of Alan BrodyFaculty, SHASS, Theater, 3 Questions, Arts, Century in Cambridge, Special events and guest speakers, History, Science communications, Science writing3 Questions: Ben Ross Schneider on Brazil’s crisis momenthttps://news.mit.edu/2016/3-questions-ben-ross-schneider-brazil-crisis-moment-0322
As political scandal swirls, are there still signs of progress?Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/3-questions-ben-ross-schneider-brazil-crisis-moment-0322<p><em>Brazil has been much touted in the 21<sup>st</sup> century as a fast-rising “BRIC” country (Brazil, Russia, India, China) spurring global growth. But a sprawling political corruption scandal and economic turmoil have cast shadows on this once-sunny landscape. President Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment hearings over potentially misappropriating bank funds for the state, and former president Luiz In</em><em>á</em><em>cio Lula da Silva is implicated in a corruption case. Ben Ross Schneider, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT-Brazil Program, has been studying Brazil for decades and is the editor of a new volume on the country: “New Order and Progress: Development and Democracy in Brazil,” published this month by Oxford University Press. (The book stems in part from connections forged through the MIT-Brazil Program.) Schneider talked with MIT News about the progress and setbacks Brazil is experiencing. </em></p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Brazil only emerged from dictatorship in the 1980s. Given the current corruption scandal reaching into the president’s office, how do you assess the robustness of its democracy?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> It’s always a humbling experience to publish on Brazil because events move so rapidly. It’s only about five years ago that people were talking about Brazil’s sustained takeoff into development and democratic consolidation, and now it’s in the midst of the worst economic crisis in almost a century, and the worst political crisis in 20 years. Things change quickly.</p>
<p>I think nobody could have imagined the extent of the corruption crisis. It exceeds previous known corruption crises [in Brazil] by an order of magnitude. There are over 100 people indicted, many of them in jail. There were signs of corruption earlier. But this is bigger than anyone suspected.</p>
<p>For many Brazilians it’s hard to see the silver lining, because the crisis is so deep, but the bright spot is that the judiciary and the other accountability agencies have been doing their work, uncovering these fraud and corruption schemes. It’s a fairly new development in Brazil that they have been able to use plea bargains, which barely existed 20 years ago and have been developed by a series of young prosecutors, but that’s what opened up this case. People have made agreements and that has led to further discoveries. So plea bargaining is very new and it has been working very well.</p>
<p>Other institutions have also been working, not smoothly exactly but mostly according to rule. There’s a political crisis and increasing likelihood of an impeachment [of President Rousseff], but it’s going according to the institutional rules.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> Brazil’s economy grew significantly until recent years, but it has long been dependent on exporting commodities, among other things. How can it emerge with a more diversified economy?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> What so surprised Brazil was that it came through the 2008-09 world financial crisis very well. For the first time in Brazilian history, there was a world recession without a Brazilian recession. And that got people thinking, “Maybe this time really is different.” It turned out not to be true as the world economy slowed, in particular that of China, on which Brazil had become so dependent. That had a direct impact on Brazilian exports. But there are a lot of other domestic factors: slow productivity growth, low investment, the fiscal crisis, inflation, high interest rates, and more. Most people suspected that the end of the commodity boom would come, and for Brazil it was particularly bad timing, because the country was also going into its own fiscal and other crises.</p>
<p>The optimistic view would be that there have been attempts over the past decades to address some of the issues underlying the slow productivity growth: for example, increasing investment in education and technology, which took place through the beginning of the crisis. So if and when the other crises are resolved, we [could] see more growth from these investments in education, and innovation, and human capital.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> As you point out in the book, by one estimation Brazil’s middle class grew from 38 percent of the population in 2003 to 60 percent of the population in 2015. Is the discontent in Brazil partly driven by the higher expectations that a large chunk of the population now has, for its own prospects and the government’s performance?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> Yes, definitely. The first [large-scale political] demonstrations came out before the 2014 World Cup, really in 2013, and that signaled a moment when it was clear there was generalized dissatisfaction with public services. This has to do with health care and education in particular, which the new middle class realized were not up to the standards it was expecting, I think. About 1.5 million jobs disappeared in the last year, and a lot of this is hitting the new middle class hard. But there was a decade and a half of expansion, and assuming the crisis doesn’t continue indefinitely, much of that middle class should survive.</p>
<p>As I wrote in the book, Brazil is rarely doing as well as people think in good times or as badly as people think in tough times. But this crisis is certainly among the worst, with no end yet in sight.</p>
“As I wrote in the book, Brazil is rarely doing as well as people think in good times, nor as badly as people think in tough times. But this crisis is certainly among the worst, with no end yet in sight,” says Ben Ross Schneider, editor of a new volume on the country, “New Order and Progress: Development and Democracy in Brazil,” published this month by Oxford University Press.
Image: MIT News3 Questions, Faculty, SHASS, Political science, Brazil, Government, Books and authors, MISTICode of the humans https://news.mit.edu/2016/book-chomsky-berwick-language-skills-0301
New book by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick explores how people acquired unique language skills.Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-chomsky-berwick-language-skills-0301<p>For many years, researchers tried to teach other kinds of animals some human language. Chimps, dolphins, gorillas — it didn’t seem to matter which animals they tried. Few experiments were regarded as success stories.</p>
<p>Small children, however, learn whichever language they are taught, and abundant evidence points toward the universality of human language. Platoons of linguists have detailed strong syntactical similarities among the world’s tongues. And biologists have begun to identify some of the genes involved in the development of speech and possibly language.</p>
<p>“Human language is a generative system that determines an infinite set of possible semantic objects,” says Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT.</p>
<p>“People don’t realize how uniform the human population is,” adds Robert C. Berwick, a computer scientist at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. “We’re all very alike as humans, and this language capacity is incredibly uniform. If you take a baby from Southern Africa and put it in Beijing, they’ll speak Chinese.”</p>
<p>Now Berwick and Chomsky have collaborated on a new book on the topic, “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-only-us">Why Only Us?</a>,” published on March 1 by the MIT Press, which explores the grand riddles of human language — what makes it unique, as well as where, when, why, and how humans acquired a distinctive, language capacity of nonpareil sophistication.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Out of Blombos?</strong></p>
<p>The questions of when and where human language emerged are probably the simplest to grapple with. Like some other scholars, Berwick and Chomsky think the emergence of symbolic behavior is a guidepost indicating when human language developed. The Blombos cave artifacts in South Africa, comprising engravings and beads that are 80,000 years old, are a possible landmark. Modern humans arose about 200,000 years ago, so the development of our language capacity most likely falls in between those two points in time. Still, Chomsky notes how “thin the empirical record is” on this count.</p>
<p>Precisely what evolved, Berwick and Chomsky contend, is what Chomsky calls “Merge:” the human cognitive capacity to take any two things that we now recognize as sentence elements, and combine them into a new, more complex, hierarchically structured phrase.</p>
<p>“In its simplest terms, the Merge operation is just set formation,” the authors write. But if it sounds simple, this operation is precisely what allows human language to be infinite; there is absolutely no limit on the number of sentences we can form.</p>
<p>There are some other things that mark human language as distinct, so far as we know — for instance, our statements do not have to make reference to the external world. But the unbounded nature of language appears crucial at all times.</p>
<p>If so, how did such a powerful capability emerge in people? Berwick and Chomsky suggest it resulted from not a giant evolutionary leap but a modest evolutionary step that turned out to be very useful.</p>
<p>“What we’re arguing is that there was probably a very small change which had large effects,” Chomsky says. In the book as well, the authors suggest our language capacity was “the result of a minor mutation” in genomic terms that had far-reaching changes in our capacities.</p>
<p>“Evolution has [often] assembled lots of other parts that enable a whole host of other behaviors that you didn’t have before,” Berwick observes. “It [the language capacity] is standard in that kind of picture. It’s fully compatible with what a Darwinian might have thought.”</p>
<p>He adds: “We’re getting more and more of an understanding of the genomic basis for some of these traits, but it’s extremely challenging to work out.”</p>
<p><strong>The real leap: intentional, conceptual thoughts</strong></p>
<p>The hardest question to answer, it seems, is why humans should have a uniquely unbounded language. Or, to put it another way, what purpose did language play that made it a useful trait in evolutionary terms?</p>
<p>Berwick and Chomsky, following decades of work and theorizing by Chomsky, do not believe that language evolved primarily as a form of communication. Rather, it is an offshoot of the development of our cognitive capacities — an “inner mental tool,” as they write, at the interface of intentional thought and the ability to think conceptually.</p>
<p>In this sense, “Merge would be just like any other ‘internal’ trait that boosted selective advantage,” they write, something that would be helpful in planning, making inferences, and other basic capacities.</p>
<p>That said, Berwick and Chomsky readily acknowledge they do not possess a full hypothesis explaining how people developed the capacity for having those abstract conceptual thoughts in the first place.</p>
<p>“There is no explanation of where those come from,” Berwick says. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“The nature of elementary human concepts, such as table or chair, is unknown, and what’s striking about them is that they’re radically different than anything in the animal world,” Chomsky says. “It’s very different from other animals.”</p>
<p>“Why Only Us” has received advance praise from other scholars. Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University, calls it “captivating and a must for everyone interested in evolution and humans.”</p>
<p>And Berwick and Chomsky note that they hope to inspire further research, potentially integrating neuroscience to a growing extent, in addition to proposing answers to these scientific mysteries.</p>
<p>Or, as they write, “a vast array of language phenomena remain unexplained and even barely examined, but the picture sketched here seems to us the most plausible one we have, and one that offers many opportunities for fruitful research and inquiry.”</p>
“Why Only Us: Language and Evolution” (MIT Press), by Robert C. Berwick (top left) and Noam Chomsky (bottom left)Research, Linguistics, Language, Evolution, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs), Books and authors, SHASS, School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)Thomas Levenson receives the 2016 Levitan Prize in the Humanitieshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/thomas-levenson-receives-levitan-prize-humanities-0202
Award will support research on the South Sea Bubble crisis as an example of connections between scientific developments and their larger social consequences.Tue, 02 Feb 2016 14:05:01 -0500School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/thomas-levenson-receives-levitan-prize-humanities-0202<p>Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing and director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, has been awarded the James A. (1945) and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities, a $30,000 research grant that will support his investigation into the economic, cultural, and scientific history of an 18th century financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble.<br />
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"There are always great entries for the Levitan Prize," said Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. "Tom's proposal stood out in part because his project explores the deep connections between scientific developments and their larger social consequences. Tom has a unique gift for storytelling, and I really look forward to seeing what he does with the South Sea Bubble."<br />
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The Levitan Prize is awarded annually to support innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities. Established through a gift from the late James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry who was also a member of the MIT Corporation, the Levitan Prize was first awarded in 1990.<br />
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“The material side of the award is lovely, of course," said Levenson, "but what I feel most is the pleasure of having my work valued by colleagues. When I opened the email from Dean Nobles that told me the news, I was just thrilled.”<br />
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<strong>The South Sea Bubble</strong></p>
<p>The prize will support Levenson’s research on a new book focused on the South Sea Bubble and the critical role the event played in transforming money from a thing — such as a gold disc — into an abstraction. The work centers on a 1720 crisis that began with Britain dangerously in debt, confronting an offer from a hybrid bank and trading firm.<br />
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That was the South Sea Company, which offered to trade its own shares for privately held government debt. As debt-holders took the deal, the stock’s value initially went up and up. Then, the stock crashed with dire consequences.<br />
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“The South Sea Bubble is mostly known (if it's remembered at all) as the type specimen of a stock market catastrophe and an object lesson in money manias and the perils of greed. It is all of those things, but what I'm pursuing in my project is a richer, broader, and more nuanced understanding of the event,” Levenson said.<br />
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<strong>The scientific revolution and modern capitalism</strong><br />
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“I plan to trace the roots of the bubble, it's pre-history, in the context of the 17th century scientific revolution," Levenson said. "The new ideas about money and finance that were given expression in the bubble were born of that much larger intellectual, political, and cultural shift, and the decisions that led to the bubble gain sense and significance now in light of that larger context."<br />
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“Second, I want to understand what the bubble achieved — for the usually untold story (at least in popular accounts) is the one in which Britain emerges from the South Sea disaster with the first modern bond markets, with all the rewards and risks thus implied."<br />
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"The bubble marked a key step in the development of modern financial capitalism and a huge shift in the ways and means of acquiring wealth and power, he said. “My book centers on the Bubble Year of 1720 — but more broadly it’s about how changes in the way human beings investigate experience has transformed not just the study of planets or the flight of a cannon ball, but also the way we make, get, spend, and live.”<br />
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Levenson said the prize funding will enable him to devote the forthcoming summer to the project and to hire a research assistant to further his investigations. “There is so much material now available that the process of finding records, turning information into data, and organizing their interpretation is one that deeply benefits from having help,” he said.</p>
<p><strong>Previous Books</strong></p>
<p>Levenson is the author of five previous books on science and the history of science: "The Hunt for Vulcan: And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe" (2015); "Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist" (2009); "Einstein in Berlin" (2003); "Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science" (1994); and "Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth" (1989). He has also produced, directed, written, and or executive-produced more than a dozen science documentaries, most recently the PBS mini-series "Origins" (2004).</p>
<p><span style="font-size:12px;"><em>Story prepared by SHASS Communications<br />
Director, Editor: Emily Hiestand<br />
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill</em></span></p>
Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing and director of the MIT-SHASS Graduate Program in Science WritingPhoto: Joel Benjamin Faculty, Awards, honors and fellowships, History of science, History, Science writing, Economics, Research, SHASS, Technology and society, Writing3 Questions: Azra Akšamija&#039;s multidisciplinary practice in art and architecturehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/azra-aksamija-multidisciplinary-practice-art-and-architecture-0201
Professor&#039;s work explores blurred identities and representations of Islam in the West.Mon, 01 Feb 2016 09:00:00 -0500Tom Gearty | School of Architecture and Planninghttps://news.mit.edu/2016/azra-aksamija-multidisciplinary-practice-art-and-architecture-0201<p><em>For MIT Assistant Professor Azra Akšamija, many of today’s headlines resonate both personally and professionally. Born in Sarajevo, Akšamija and her family fled Bosnia from the war in in 1992, when she was 14. She then moved among European countries and the United States as a Muslim immigrant pursuing her education and her art.&nbsp;&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><em>Today, through a multidisciplinary practice in art and architecture, Akšamija</em> <em>focuses on the representation of Islam in the West, spatial mediation of identity politics, and cultural transfers through art and architecture. Her work explores and blurs the boundaries between identities, such as her “wearable mosques” — including a traditional Austrian dirndl dress that </em><a href="http://www.azraaksamija.net/project-5/" target="_blank"><em>transforms into an Islamic prayer environment</em></a><em> — or her architectural design for a prayer space at the award-winning </em><a href="http://www.akdn.org/architecture/project.asp?id=4319" target="_blank"><em>Islamic Cemetery in Altach, Austria</em></a><em>, constructed of local materials in the manner of regional craft traditions while drawing upon motifs of Islamic religious architecture.</em></p>
<p><em>Akšamija, the Class of 1922 Career Development Professor in the Department of Architecture and assistant professor in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT), spoke with the School of Architecture and Planning about her life and work and her perspective on the intersection of culture, religion, and politics. </em></p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>You create work that grapples with representations — and misrepresentations — of religious and cultural identity, including how Islamic identities are framed in the West. What first drew you to these topics as an artist?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>Personal history. I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, a place historically known as the Jerusalem of Europe. I grew up in an environment where many different cultures and religions coexisted for centuries. Historically, that coexistence was fruitful, and you can see this in the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the Balkans. That certainly informed my life and my family's views. The war in the Balkans in the 1990s instrumentalized this cultural and religious diversity for political ends, and that affected my artistic and intellectual trajectory from then on.</p>
<p>I have been living outside of my hometown from the 1990s onward, when we fled Bosnia — first to Germany, then to Austria. I have also lived in other countries throughout Western Europe, and then finally moved to the United States for graduate school in 2002. On the one hand, the experience of a migrant’s life allowed me to feel at home in many different places, and these new cultures shaped me in a very positive sense. On the other hand, being a Muslim from Central Europe has exposed me to certain problems of perception and misrepresentation in Western Europe and the United States, where I was often put in a position of having to justify my identity, or defend something that my culture stands for.</p>
<p>Through my research I came to understand that culture was completely instrumental in dividing a society. In Bosnia, I documented the systematic targeting of religious buildings, and culturally and ethnically significant sites, and analyzed how this cultural warfare enforced division of a multiethnic society. There was a certain sadism against architecture and culture that was meant to ultimately humiliate and intimidate people — using cultural instruments to prevent people from wanting to live together in the future.</p>
<p>Culture and art go hand-in-hand with politics, as I learned from the war in Bosnia, and this is where I discovered for the first time the power of culture. If culture was so powerful in the hands of nationalist extremists who wanted to transform Bosnia's multiethnic society into ethnically homogenous, separated, and mutually hostile nationalist enclaves, then we can also work with cultural means against these kinds of developments. This is what I’m trying to do in my work.</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>The portrayal of Muslims in the United States has recently included calls for registering Muslims or barring them from entering the country. What is your reaction to how these issues are being framed?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> If we learned one thing from the Second World War, it’s that there can be a frightening trajectory when this kind of rhetoric is used. Politicians exploiting hate speech and populist rhetoric need to be held accountable, and the media has a big responsibility in giving a voice — a differentiated voice — to other kinds of representations. In the current debates, what’s very problematic is that opinions get polarized into either/or categories. What we really need more of in the media is another, multilayered perspective on Islamic culture, one that is not exclusively linked to violence and war.</p>
<p>At MIT, for example, we can shed light on Islamic civilization’s contribution to the sciences. So much of the knowledge we are building on today is based on the achievements of Islamic scientists from the past. And contemporary Islamic societies aren’t stuck in the past. There are incredible scientific and cultural achievements — of people affiliated with Islamic civilization who may be either secular or religious — happening in the Middle East or the United States that could be reported on.</p>
<p>There’s also something that art can do, and that’s why I titled my book "<a href="http://act.mit.edu/news/2015/09/11/aksamijas-mosque-manifesto-now-in-print/">Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence</a>." I’m not directly engaging these political debates with defensive or offensive statements, but rather expanding the vocabulary of representation through alternative forms of religious architecture. There is this amazing opportunity to design mosques today with a language that appeals to Muslims in different contexts, but also to their non-Muslim neighbors for functions that could be both Islamic and non-Islamic.</p>
<p>What I’m trying to do is offer a new aesthetic while moving beyond the iconic language. I work on a sensory level and human scale to communicate and move people, which is something that art, architecture, and culture can do.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Q: </strong>It seems as though art that touches upon these issues could be challenging. How do people respond to your work?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>I’ve had wonderful feedback, especially from the young Muslim community. People see themselves in [the art], as some of these pieces are empathetic. They speak to both Muslims and non-Muslims.</p>
<p>My work has been presented and exhibited in Islamic as well as non-Islamic contexts. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, <a href="http://www.azraaksamija.net/flocking-mosque/" target="_blank">my work</a> has challenged the established norms of gender segregation, revealing how tradition is malleable and constantly reinvented. In the United States, I created the "<a href="http://www.azraaksamija.net/survival-mosque/" target="_blank">Survival Mosque</a>," giving form to experiences about how it felt to be a Muslim in America after September 11.</p>
<p>In Austria and Germany, Jewish museums have been defending the interests of Muslim minorities. Because of their own history in Europe, they understand these concerns. I think some of my pieces, like the Jewish/Muslim hybrid called "<a href="http://www.azraaksamija.net/frontier-vest/" target="_blank">Frontier Vest</a>" or the "<a href="http://www.azraaksamija.net/shingle-mihrab/" target="_blank">Shingle Mihrab</a>," speak to the Jewish and Christian communities too, because they introduce the idea of coexistence, the possibility of cultural hybridization, and the simultaneous belonging to different places.</p>
<p>When I exhibit my work, it’s interesting to see how the curator or venue chooses to describe me, depending on what they need and what kind of message they want to communicate. Sometimes I'll be an “Austrian artist.” Sometimes I’ll be a “Bosnian-born artist,” sometimes I’m a “Muslim woman artist.” I often joke that I’m a Sarajevo-born, Austrian Muslim, living and working in Cambridge, but with a global practice, and working across disciplines of art, architecture, design, and history.</p>
<p>How do you even express the entirety of your own persona? The bottom line is: We are all humans, and we can relate to each other on the level of our humanity.</p>
Azra Akšamija designed the prayer space of the Islamic Cemetery in Altach, Austria, winner of a 2013 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The overall cemetery project was designed by Bernardo Bader.Photo: AKAA/Marc LinsArchitecture, Faculty, 3 Questions, Arts, Design, School of Architecture and Planning, Art, Arts, Culture and Technology, Islam, Books and authorsReality check in the factoryhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-labor-laws-enforced-globally-0126
MIT professor’s new book shows how labor laws actually get enforced, globally.Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/book-labor-laws-enforced-globally-0126<p>When the globalization of manufacturing took flight a few decades ago, the problem of industrial workplace safety also became fully globalized. As many scholars, human-rights advocates, and labor leaders have observed, that challenge consists of more than just persuading developing nations to create labor laws — it is also a matter of enforcing those labor laws.</p>
<p>Indeed, enforcement may be the greater challenge, as new factories continue to spread across vast distances in Asia, Central America, and other regions. Problems include unsafe buildings, inhumane hours, pollution, unpaid wages, and more. A common enforcement scenario today involves an underfunded regulatory agency with a small staff, and hundreds of potential cases to examine. Where do regulators even begin?</p>
<p>Matthew Amengual, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, started investigating that question on the ground in Argentina nearly a decade ago — talking to regulators, union bosses, firm managers, and key players with knowledge about labor conditions. Over time, he interviewed hundreds of people, watched inspections occur, and catalogued Argentina’s intricate regulatory politics as deeply as any outside observer has.</p>
<p>What Amengual found surprised him. A large thread within political science theory, drawing from the German sociologist Max Weber, holds that states can best enforce labor laws when they act as politically neutral arbiters of regulations. But such neutral arbiters largely did not exist in Argentina. There, many regulators only learned where to find malfeasance by working closely with non-neutral parties, say, union leaders, or immigrant groups. The process of regulation needed to be politicized to happen at all.</p>
<p>In other cases, active regulators came from the ranks of business managers who were using their knowledge to clean up their own industries. None of this was textbook political science theory. But it was how things worked.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“The capabilities of the state clearly increased through this political influence by all parties,” says Amengual. “But it was enforcement nonetheless that did matter for people’s lives.”</p>
<p>Now Amengual, who received his PhD in 2011 from MIT’s Department of Political Science, has produced a full account of his findings in a new book, “Politicized Enforcement in Argentina,” published this month by Cambridge University Press, which explores how regulations are actually enforced.</p>
<p>“Why does one worker get protections, but not another?” Amengual asks. “Why does one neighborhood get a response when there’s pollution, but not another? … Who gains influence [over regulation] and how they use that influence can really vary. And that’s going to matter for what states do. That’s something that has been pushed aside.”</p>
<p><strong>Watershed moment</strong></p>
<p>A “watershed moment” in Amengual’s research occurred in the Argentine province of Cordoba, when an inspector he knew met up with a union leader representing metal workers. Soon the two of them, and Amengual, were driving off in the union leader’s car to a factory.</p>
<p>‘The labor unions have all kinds of information and resources that allow the inspectors to do their jobs,” Amengual says. In Cordoba, he notes, the regulators “didn’t even have cars to be able to go out and do the inspections. They didn’t have time. They didn’t have strong training.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>But the regulators did have information they could act on, courtesy of the unions — and so they did. Enforcement would not have been possible otherwise.</p>
<p>That said, while regulators were busy inspecting the metal industry, they were less watchful over small-scale brickmakers, an industry where many kinds of violations may have been even more abundant, but which lacked union organizing. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“You have enforcement, but it’s happening where the unions are present, not [always] where it’s most needed,” Amengual says.</p>
<p>It wasn’t just labor advocates driving regulation, however. Surprisingly, in the province of Tucuman, where sugar mills that produced ethanol were polluting the water, the move toward legal compliance occurred thanks in part to business managers who joined the government and pushed firms to meet environmental regulations.</p>
<p>The government hired regulators “right out of industry, they gave them short-term contracts, and some of them went right back into industry afterwards,” Amengual says. “It was a recipe for disaster, according to [political science theory]. But those were the guys who were actually doing something to enforce environmental laws.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>How could that happen? Amengual attributes it partly to the presence of environmental groups, in conjunction with the gradual increase in regulators’ ability to assess the pollution problems. “Industry actually wanted regulators between it and the social movement pressure,” Amengual observes.</p>
<p>In turn, Amengual says, he would like political scientists and policymakers alike to recognize these realities of regulation. Instead of regarding politicized enforcement as a tainted form of state action, he thinks, people should realize that labor regulations are always going to be political. The question is how to let the politics spur enforcement, while not totally capturing the process.</p>
<p>“If this is the way policies are being enforced in much of the world, it does matter,” Amengual asserts. “I don’t think Argentina is unique.”</p>
<p><strong>Motivated by big problems</strong></p>
<p>While “Politicized Enforcement in Argentina” is Amengual’s first book, other scholars have taken note of his research, which has also been published in multiple journal articles in past years. Janice Fine, an associate professor in Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, has called Amengual’s work “path-breaking” and says he is “an important voice in the debate about labor standards enforcement.”</p>
<p>Amengual is currently looking at the realities of workplace enforcement as they occur in a transnational regulatory program operating in Asia, and continues to emphasize issues of labor and environmental standards in his research.</p>
<p>As for the book — which got its start as a PhD dissertation in MIT’s Department of Political Science — Amengual says it was a “very MIT” project from the beginning, given its ambition of tackling a global issue through empirical research.</p>
<p>“One part of this project that is very MIT is that it’s motivated by big problems in the world,” Amengual concludes. “We know how to build factories that don’t collapse, yet factories collapse. We know that paying people to work motivates them and creates all kinds of good outcomes, but people have their wages stolen. How do we politically organize ourselves to respond to those challenges? When we go out into the world to conduct research, we update our understanding of what might be possible.”</p>
A new book, “Politicized Enforcement in Argentina” (Cambridge University Press), by Matthew Amengual investigates worker safety and the global realities of labor-law enforcement. Here, a group of metal workers assist in steel production. Research, Faculty, Sloan School of Management, Business and management, Industry, Labor, Books and authors, Government, Alumni/ae, Political science, SHASSCelebrating the &quot;Pleasures of Poetry&quot; at MIThttps://news.mit.edu/2016/pleasures-of-poetry-0119
Now in its 20th season, a popular poetry series provides the MIT community with new voices and verbal harmonies — and a window into MIT&#039;s varied poetry offerings.Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:10:01 -0500School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Scienceshttps://news.mit.edu/2016/pleasures-of-poetry-0119<p>The roots of MIT's literary and arts traditions can be traced back to the earliest years of the Institute's history. The initial MIT course catalogue of 1865 offered classes in English and other modern languages; the Banjo Club and the first Tech Orchestra were formed in 1884; MIT's Dramashop launched with a Eugene O’Neill play in 1927; and in 1932, the Institute's newly formed Division of Humanities offered instruction in, among other subjects, music, fine arts, English, and literature.<br />
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One shining example of the literary arts at MIT is taking place each weekday afternoon during this year’s January winter break, when a group of MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni gather around a long table in Building 14 for the 20th annual Pleasures of Poetry series — a renowned, month-long course that runs during the MIT Independent Activities Period (IAP).</p>
<p>“The idea is to convene a diverse community to discuss poetry,” says professor of literature David Thorburn, who founded the series in 1996. “Regardless of one’s formal background in literature, poetry should be available to everybody.”</p>
<p>In keeping with Thorburn’s egalitarian view, no previous academic study of poetry is required to participate in Pleasures of Poetry. People can attend just one session or all the gatherings with no registration required. MIT undergraduates also have the option to take the course for credit. Thorburn’s vision has drawn MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni from many MIT disciplines to the sessions, where participants can also choose to lead one or more of the afternoon discussions.<br />
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<strong>Range, depth, and connection </strong><br />
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Of the Pleasures of Poetry course, Wyn Kelley, senior lecturer in literature observes, “You get such a wide range of people from across the Institute participating. It’s very different&nbsp;from a typical classroom experience, and our students are amazed at the depth and connection that's possible outside the formal classroom.”<br />
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Session leaders come to the conversations with a range of backgrounds. The discussion might be led one day by an engineering alumnus, the next day by a biology student, then by a renowned literary scholar, and then by an MIT librarian. The conversations are lively — as ever, "non disputandum de gustibus" ("in matters of taste there can be no disputes") — and are characterized, famously, by a spirit of mutual regard.<br />
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“I'm a big fan of Pleasures of Poetry,” says junior Casey Crownhart, a double major in chemical engineering and literature. “The sessions brought me back to the wintry landscape of Cambridge for IAP this year, and I expect they'll continue to do so in the future. The Pleasures of Poetry course also played a big part in my decision to become a Literature major at MIT.”<br />
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Another key feature of the course is the diversity of authors who are read and discussed — one result of the varied backgrounds of the discussion leaders. Over the years, poets studied have included canonical authors such as Dante Alighieri, Basho, William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens; pop culture icons such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; and contemporary masters including Louise Glück, Nikki Giovanni, Derek Walcott, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Rowan Ricardo Philips, Anne Carson, and Gregory Pardlo.&nbsp;<br />
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“It was great to be confronted with so many poets who I would not otherwise have come across,” says Adam Nahum, a postdoc in the Department of Physics. “My knowledge of poetry was still heavily based on the British poets I read in high school, and it was wonderful to be led beyond that canon.”</p>
<p><strong>Arts Innovation </strong></p>
<p>By 1950, the curriculum of the MIT Division of Humanities had grown into the MIT School of Humanities and Social Studies (MIT-SHASS), and in 2000, reflecting the increasing significance of the arts for research and education, became the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Just one year after the founding of the school in 1950, verse took a center stage at MIT when acclaimed poet ee cummings — best known to readers for his whimsical style and unusual typography — was invited to give a public reading on campus. The event was announced with some excitement on the front page of <em>The Tech</em>, MIT’s student newspaper, and was so well received that cummings was asked to return in 1958.<br />
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In subsequent years, visionaries such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot all appeared on campus as well. (A <a href="http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/thomas.cfm" target="_blank">recording</a> of Thomas’s reading at MIT is available on the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room website.)<br />
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For years, faculty, students, and poetry lovers from across the area packed MIT auditoriums to hear readings by significant contemporary poets: Adrienne Rich, A.R. Ammons, Seamus Heaney, Maureen McLane, Li-Young Lee, Ange Mlinko, John Ashbery, and Linda Gregerson, to name just a few. Many of these readings were organized by MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) program senior lecturers Ed Barrett and William Corbett.<br />
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“I wanted to present poetry at MIT as a living, vital art,” says Corbett from his home in Brooklyn. “My MIT students were interested in poetry but most of them had never heard it live. They deserved a taste — and they deserved to hear poetry that was not being presented elsewhere in Boston and Cambridge.”<br />
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Along with Corbett himself, a writing instructor at MIT for more than two decades, MIT-SHASS has had a number of talented poets among its faculty. In the years between 1950 and 2000, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, and Fanny Howe all taught at the Institute for a time. Poets currently on the faculty include David Thorburn and&nbsp;Stephen Tapscott in&nbsp;Literature, as well as Erica Funkhauser, Ed Barrett, Nick Montfort, and Susan Carlisle in CMS/W.</p>
<p><strong>Shakespeare, digital poetry, "Paradise Lost" for engineers</strong><br />
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The poetry classes offered by MIT Literature and CMS/W reflect the scope of the MIT-SHASS faculty. Courses on “Global Shakespeares,” “A Guidebook to 'Paradise Lost' for Engineers,” “Digital Poetry,” and “British Poetry and the Sciences of the Mind” are a sample from dozens of subjects. In addition, many of MIT's literature and writing courses can be explored online through the free MIT OpenCourseWare project.<br />
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MIT faculty also pursue poetry research, including works on science in Romantic poetry, Shakespeare across time and media, T.S. Eliot's use of Dante, and the intersection of literature and digital technology. Associate Professor Nick Montfort, for example, theorizes, constructs, and produces computational verse — poetry generated by computer programs. His publications include "#!" and the "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" project, a work co-written with nine other authors. In January 2015, Montfort published a New Year’s poem at the CMS/W blog that was generated by a single line of code written for the Commodore 64 BASIC program.</p>
<p>The Institute has served as an incubator for poets beyond the classroom as well. Longtime MIT staff member Pamela Alexander, now an associate professor at Oberlin College, ushered several much-admired volumes of poetry into print during her days at MIT. Kevin McLellan, administrator in MIT Global Studies and Languages, published his debut collection, entitled "Tributary," in 2015. Three active poets inhabit the staff of the Dean’s Office of MIT-SHASS, and at the MIT Press, Senior Production Coordinator Daniel Bouchard has a new volume of poems, "Art and Nature."</p>
<p>In addition, in recent years MIT has given campus homes to both <em>Boston Review,</em> one of the nation's premier intellectual and literary magazines, and to PEN New England, the New England branch of PEN American Center, a venerable writers' organization that advocates for literacy, freedom of speech, and human rights. ("PEN" stands for "Poets, Editors, Novelists.")</p>
<p><strong>A laboratory of the imagination</strong><br />
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“I would be a tolerable Mathematician,” wrote the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796. More than two centuries later, MIT students are proving that mathematicians — not to mention engineers, programmers, physicists, economists, architects, and biologists — make more than tolerable poets as well.<br />
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Erica Funkhauser, Lecturer in CMS/W and poet whose work has appeared in <em>The Atlantic, Harvard Review, </em>and <em>AGNI,</em> among other publications, says that the study of poetry offers MIT students a powerful opportunity to explore other types of puzzles: namely themselves, and each other.</p>
<p>“In poetry workshops, our students have the opportunity to explore their own identities in ways other courses are not designed for,” she explains. “MIT students come from all over the globe, and they have rich personal histories. A poetry workshop is often the first opportunity our students have to really hear each other.”</p>
<p>Funkhouser’s students drew on this experience when they worked with her to write “Here We Are,” a poem she and her students read collectively at the 2015 ceremony to dedicate the Sean Collier Memorial.<br />
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<strong>Learning to dwell, with concentrated attention </strong><br />
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“In some ways,” says Stephen Tapscott, professor of literature, “I’m more proud of things like Pleasures of Poetry, and the many poetry classes and workshops that MIT has offered over the years than I am of the readings and the famous faculty. The Pleasures of Poetry course reveals a different kind of commitment to the art. Often the students studying poetry aren't doing it for the sake of a major or minor. They do it purely for the pleasure they take in the art.”<br />
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Tapscott, an acclaimed critic, poet, and translator, has been a member of the MIT faculty for more than three decades. (In his first year at the Institute, he recalls, his office was next door to that of noted American poet and story writer Elizabeth Bishop.) MIT students gravitate toward poetry, Tapscott theorizes, not only because it energizes their creative thinking, but also because of the particular cognitive skills poetry helps them develop.<br />
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“Poems teach our students how to dwell, with concentrated attention,” Tapscott explains. “Dwelling with concentration is a skill — one that has to be taught, and one that our students don’t necessarily develop elsewhere in their lives, especially these days.”</p>
<p><strong>"I'm studying poetry to be a better engineer."</strong></p>
<p>A recent entry on the MIT Admissions blog by an MIT mechanical engineering major echoes Tapscott’s sentiment. In a post entitled, “I’m studying poetry to be a better engineer,” senior Michael C. writes: “In a world where we are surrounded by anonymous, thoughtless, prosaic prose — think endless listicles on Facebook — reading a piece where every syllable, every punctuation mark, every line is carefully considered… it's a breath of fresh air.”<br />
<br />
This young engineer has already recognized that studying poetry irreducibly mingles pleasure and craft. "There is a good argument," he says, "that art for art’s sake is reason enough" — and he also appreciates that a deep engagement with art goes hand-in-glove with the attainment of a set of powers, in the case of poetry the ability to communicate with concision and clarity.<br />
<br />
As has often been noted, writing and studying poetry is frequently a path for increasing self-knowledge, discernment, and perseverance — all fine qualities to bring to creative, problem-solving endeavors. In 2015, when MIT was named <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2015/mit-named-among-three-top-universities-humanities-and-arts-1022" target="_self">one of the top three universities</a> in the world for humanities and the arts, MIT President L. Rafael Reif reflected on why the Institute values the arts and humanities traditions, noting that “Humanities and arts teaching is central to guiding MIT students in their growth as human beings who … are prepared to be bold, thoughtful leaders of constructive change.”</p>
<p>In earlier comments for MIT's <em>Spectrvm</em> magazine, President Reif also observed that, “The arts have never been more integral to the life of MIT nor more deserving of our focus and attention. The world counts on MIT to help invent the future," he said. "This limitless assignment requires the ability to visualize things no one has seen before, to create unexpected combinations, to listen to different voices and find new harmonies together.”<br />
&nbsp;</p>
<h5><em>Story prepared by SHASS Communications<br />
Emily Hiestand, Communications Director<br />
Daniel Evans Pritchard, Communications Associate</em><br />
&nbsp;</h5>
Literature, languages and writing, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Humanities, Writing, SHASS, Independent Activities Period, Classes and programsLife in the aftermathhttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ekmekcioglu-book-armenia-0108
MIT historian’s book explores life for Armenians in modern Turkey.Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500Peter Dizikes | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2016/ekmekcioglu-book-armenia-0108<p>In 1919, an Istanbul resident named Hayganush Mark did something remarkable: She started a magazine. Today, that might not sound extraordinary. But Mark was Armenian. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians had just been massacred as members of a religious and ethnic minority in the Ottoman Empire, and Armenians were still fleeing in the years after 1915.</p>
<p>Mark’s publication, <em>Hay Gin</em>, gave voice to an endangered group — and it kept appearing until 1933, when the Turkish government shut it down.</p>
<p>Moreover, <em>Hay Gin</em> featured feminist perspectives on work, marriage, and politics, which were not exactly common at the time. In publishing the journal, Mark was engaged in an act of political courage, while providing a guide about “how to be an Armenian in post-genocide Turkey,” as MIT historian Lerna Ekmekcioglu writes in a unique new book on the subject.</p>
<p>The small community of Armenians who stayed in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, had to find their way forward during a period of emotional trauma, continued discrimination, and political upheaval (the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923). And many of those people faced an enduring tension: They wanted to modernize society and press for political change, while acknowledging a desire to keep social customs and traditional arrangements intact, as a way of preserving the existentially threatened Armenian community.</p>
<p>“I try to show how the story unfolds for [those] Armenians,” says Ekmekcioglu, who is the McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at MIT and an affiliate of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT. “They had to or chose to live inside Turkey, alongside the perpetrators. What did they do to make it work for them? How did they adjust to these conditions?”</p>
<p><strong>A brief “exceptional period” of hope</strong></p>
<p>Ekmekcioglu’s book, “Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey,” published this week by Stanford University Press, is the first in-depth history of the Armenians who stayed in Turkey in the immediate aftermath of World War I. At the close of the war, Armenians looked to the victorious Allies to help them carve out a state for Turkish Armenians that would be contiguous with the existing state of Armenia. They wanted a safe haven for the remaining people in their nation, established in what they considered their historic homeland. For a while, their hopes were high, as the victorious Allied powers voiced support for their goals.</p>
<p>Ekmekcioglu terms the years from 1918 to 1922 an “exceptional period” in the history of Armenians in Turkey, the one time they expected the full rights they did not have under the Ottomans. “Only in this period can they [Armenians] feel free, say what they want to say, and have demands,” she notes.</p>
<p>But when the Allies lost interest in Armenian statehood, those claims rebounded against the Armenians, who were accused of seeking to undermine the nascent Turkish state.</p>
<p>“The Turkish public read their territorial demands as betrayal,” Ekmekcioglu says.</p>
<p>So Armenians again had to live in the Republic of Turkey as an officially designated non-Muslim minority group, with full legal rights as Turkish citizens but in practice enduring significant institutional and individual discrimination. Ekmekcioglu contends that even though Armenians were unwanted by the state and the majority population, Turkey was still very much a livable place, not only because it was the long-time home of the local Armenians, but also because the country was changing in this period. Turkey became officially secular, which eased some pressure on Armenians, who had freedom of religion, language, and various educational rights. The official day of rest even shifted from Friday to Sunday.</p>
<p>“It makes Armenians’ lives easier because they can fit in more easily,” Ekmekcioglu observes. “It helps them imagine the future can materialize for them in Turkey.”</p>
<p><strong>Women and modernity</strong></p>
<p>By using Hayganush Mark and <em>Hay Gin</em> as a window into Armenian society at the time, Ekmekcioglu’s book carefully focuses on the role of women in the forging of modern Armenian identity in Turkey. Here Mark’s writing and editorial hand reveal a series of nuances. She believed women should have public roles, be free to work, and keep their own names after marriage. On the other hand, Mark realized that other women, and certainly many Armenian men, might disagree or be ambivalent about changes in traditional gender roles, and so <em>Hay Gin</em> featured articles about fashion, etiquette, cooking, and other traditional, domestic women’s topics.</p>
<p>“She calculated that Armenians as a community were not ready for radical feminism,” Ekmekcioglu says, adding that Mark and her circle “accepted traditional, normative womanhood. But they also thought everyone should have voices, in the way their group is governed, and in the way their future is imagined.”</p>
<p>Or, in an idiomatic Armenian phrase Ekmekcioglu can recite, Mark’s dual roles meant that “the pen, the ladle, and the needle always were by her side.” The surface domesticity of <em>Hay Gin</em> also kept the magazine underneath the radar of government censors, at least until 1933. Yet religious leaders in the Armenian community, as Ekmekcioglu details, were also wary of Mark’s ideas: What would become of Armenians if their women became too fully integrated into broader Turkish society? For all of the exceptional problems Armenians faced, this is a classic quandary of assimilation.</p>
<p>“This kind of opening up to the world comes with consequences,” Ekmekcioglu says.</p>
<p>Other scholars have praised “Recovering Armenia.” Khachig Tölölyan, director of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, calls it a “remarkably innovative history,” and “a pioneering work that will prove indispensable."</p>
<p>The issues Ekmekcioglu examines are only now beginning to find a wider hearing in Turkey. As Ekmekcioglu points out in the book, ethnic Armenians such as herself are still not permitted to teach in certain types of schools in Turkey, and they believe they have long been misrepresented in accounts of the nation’s past.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“The version of history I received at school and what I learned at home were really the opposite of one another,” Ekmekcioglu says. “I come from a family who talked about these things. There are many families who didn’t. There was a conscious effort to keep this memory alive for us.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, the 100th anniversary of the genocide’s beginning has sparked an unprecedented level of discussion of it in Turkey, Ekmekcioglu believes. Along with that has come a greater frankness about what happened and about the ongoing Armenian presence in the country.</p>
“Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” (Stanford University Press)
Courtesy of Lerna EkmekciogluFaculty, Research, SHASS, History, Books and authors, WomenSharing best practices for getting published in sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2015/best-practices-getting-published-science-1217
Panel at MIT brings together editors, students, and faculty to discuss diverse aspects of publishing research.Thu, 17 Dec 2015 16:30:01 -0500Department of Civil and Environmental Engineeringhttps://news.mit.edu/2015/best-practices-getting-published-science-1217<p>Finding the right outlet to publish scientific work is crucial for students, postdocs, and faculty. With significant changes in the publishing landscape — a proliferation of new journals, new publication models such as open access, and the introduction of new metrics to assess the impact of a paper — an open discussion of these matters is critical to better connecting scientists and publishers.</p>
<p>The MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) hosted a “Getting Published” panel on Monday, Nov. 30, convening a conversation on publishing from different angles.&nbsp;The event was open to the MIT community and provided a unique opportunity to meet experienced professionals, gain insights into the editorial processes, and discuss where scientific publishing is heading.&nbsp;The panel covered aspects of open access publishing, innovative models of peer review and publishing, and related topics.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Each of the panelists gave a short introduction about his or her work, then opened the floor to questions. The event&nbsp;focused on the challenges and opportunities inherent in publishing, including current best practices and emerging new publishing models.&nbsp;The audience included about 100 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty from across MIT, who participated in an active discussion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>The speakers, who offered insights from both the journalism and scientific sides of publishing, included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.materialstoday.com/the-team/" target="_blank">Stewart Bland</a>, senior publisher and editor of <em>Materials Today;</em></li>
<li><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors/" target="_blank">Rosamund Daw</a>, senior editor at <em>Nature;</em></li>
<li><a href="http://www.annademming.com/" target="_blank">Anna Demming</a>, editor at the UK-based <em>Institute of Physics Publishing;</em></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cell.com/cell-systems/home" target="_blank">Quincey Justman</a>, scientific editor at <em>Cell Systems;</em></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-lindsay-a956a33" target="_blank">Nick Lindsay</a>, journals director at The MIT Press; and</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors/" target="_blank">Corie Lok</a>, research highlights editor at <em>Nature.</em></li>
</ul>
<p>“Practically all the editors put the importance of good writing at the top of their recommendations,” said CEE Professor Martin Polz, who served as moderator. “No one is going to rewrite your paper for you, so the author needs to put the effort upfront into preparing clear and concise communications.”</p>
<p>“Writing a paper makes everything concrete,” said Quincey Justman of <em>Cell Systems</em>. “Show rather than tell, and make language concrete and testable. Give striking, explicit observation to make people think in a new way about the problems they care about. Ultimately, you want a relationship match between your philosophy and the reader’s.”</p>
<p><em>Nature</em>’s senior editor Rosamund Daw said you can help to get your message across by including good schematics to explain complex problems or ask a scientist in an unrelated discipline for comments. She also looks for a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. “Demonstrate generality and utility whenever possible,” she said, adding “and include a cover letter [to the editor] explaining the key findings and why you think they are important.”</p>
<p>“You might have a model that you’re working with,” noted the Institute of Physics’ Anna Demming, “but see where you might need to tweak things a bit to stay current. We live in an age of information, multimedia and open access, not dissimilar to the scientific process.”</p>
<p>“Open Access” is a term commonly used for a movement that promotes free availability and unrestricted use of research and scholarship, <a href="http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/general-information-about-open-access/open-access-faq/" target="_blank">according to the MIT Libraries</a>. “That’s about all we talk about now,” said The MIT Press Journals Director Nick Lindsay. “Three to five years ago it was not really discussed, but we’re beginning to see a hockey stick effect where it’s really taking off fast.”</p>
<p>Stewart Bland from <em>Materials Today</em> suggested letting editors know if you want to be considered as a referee for papers they receive from other authors. CEE doctoral student Kai Pan asked how far removed does someone need to be from the author to be considered for peer review. Bland said it’s ultimately the editor’s judgment call, but most likely it’s not appropriate if you know the author personally. Justman added that sometimes if the research field is so small, it might be acceptable for editors to ask other people within your circles for a review. “Breakdowns in disciplines and standards in the field are evolving which is influencing the field,” she said, adding a recommendation for The Royal Society's recent publication, “<a href="https://royalsociety.org/~/media/events/2015/04/FSSC1/FSSC-Report.pdf" target="_blank">The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication</a>.”</p>
<p>Another lively discussion surrounding peer review was this year’s Pachter’s P-value Prize, University of California at Berkeley Professor Lior Pachter’s crowdsourced challenge offering a cash prize for justifying a reasonable null model and a p-value associated to a particular statement in a genomics scholarly paper (known as the KBL paper) published by <em>Nature</em>. Over the course of the pubic and scientific discourse, there were more than 1 million page views on Pachter’s <a href="https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/i-was-wrong/" target="_blank">Pachter's blog</a>, a testament, he says, “to the fact that the collective peer reviewing taking place on these pages is not only of very high quality, but also having an impact.”</p>
<p>“Post-publication peer review is coming,” said Justman. “Reviews are becoming much more than about the science; and the process is becoming more democratic.” Pachter himself describes the challenge as a glimpse of what scientific discourse can look like when not restricted to traditional publishing channels.</p>
<p>Other audience questions and panel answers included:</p>
<p><strong>Q. </strong>When do you know when your research is ready to be published?</p>
<p><strong>A. </strong>Agree with your advisor on when your work is done, and don’t worry about the length of your paper.</p>
<p><strong>Q. </strong>What if you get a lot of papers to publish at the same time?</p>
<p><strong>A.</strong> Editors look for parallels, and cross-referees weigh in, too.</p>
<p><strong>Q. </strong>How important is name and recognition in work that gets published?</p>
<p><strong>A. </strong>It’s not important, it’s about the science.</p>
<p><strong>Q. </strong>Are there strategies editors use to mitigate/handle biases?</p>
<p><strong>A. </strong>Yes, but they’re not perfect. For example, Daw responded that <em>Nature</em> recently introduced double-blind peer review for authors [authors/institutions not revealed to peer reviewers] and that has had some impact. “Authors from China who feel there is some bias are probably the biggest users of that facility,” she said. “We’re always looking for different models for improvement and talking internally and externally with other academics about how to ensure fairness.”</p>
<p><strong>Q. </strong>In which order do you read a manuscript? Generally, do you look at big things first, or read through the whole paper? What’s the biggest attention getter?</p>
<p><strong>A. </strong>Demming says it depends on the paper while Justman likes to look at the figures. “But it’s not a cookie cutter approach,” Justman explained, “and please write your best abstract. A terrible abstract can get your paper in trouble.”<em> Nature’s</em> Corie Lok added that there are more opportunities for younger researchers to get the word out given the new opportunities in publishing such as writing opinion/editorial pieces in news outlets and contributing to blogs.</p>
<p>Daw’s presentation included a list of tips from which any scholarly researcher could benefit. Overall, she said, the science should speak for itself, but these pointers help get the message across in the best possible way:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ask a scientist in an unrelated discipline for comments.</li>
<li>Include schematics to explain complex concepts.</li>
<li>Relegate technical detail to "Supplementary Data."</li>
<li>Focus on the key conceptual advance; don’t get sidetracked.</li>
<li>Tell a complete story: Avoid “salami slicing.”</li>
<li>Demonstrate generality and utility, where appropriate.</li>
<li>Reference and debate the performance of competing technologies compared to yours.</li>
<li>Avoid the temptation to hype.&nbsp;</li>
<li>Be selective.</li>
</ul>
<p>“Publishing is a critical step to share with the world the insights of the research done in the lab — the methods, theories, and conclusions,” summarized CEE department head, Professor Markus Buehler. “Hearing the publishing perspective from the ‘other side’ — from the editors and publishers — was a very valuable experience. The panel brought together thought-leaders who understand the power of peer-review, which now transcends into new models of publication that help accelerate scientific discussion in an open format.”</p>
Science publishing panel participants included (clockwise from top left) Quincey Justman from Cell Systems, Stewart Bland from Materials Today, Rosamund Daw from Nature, moderator and MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Martin Polz, Corie Lok from Nature, Anna Demming from the Institute of Physics Publishing, and Nick Lindsay from The MIT Press. Civil and environmental engineering, MIT Press, Science writing, Research, Writing, School of EngineeringM. Taylor Fravel advises U.S. government officials on South China Sea disputeshttps://news.mit.edu/2015/m-taylor-fravel-advises-us-government-officials-south-china-sea-disputes-1211
Research merges security policy, political science, and international relations.Fri, 11 Dec 2015 18:21:01 -0500Eric Smalley | Department of Political Sciencehttps://news.mit.edu/2015/m-taylor-fravel-advises-us-government-officials-south-china-sea-disputes-1211<p>Thanks to a land reclamation project on a set of rocks and reefs in the middle of the sea, M. Taylor Fravel’s research is much in demand these days. His research isn’t about marine biology or civil engineering, however. Fravel’s analysis is sought out because the sea in question is the South China Sea and his expertise is in Chinese military strategy and security policy.<br />
<br />
The volatile combination of China’s military buildup in the Spratly Islands and multiple, highly contested claims to the bits of land, including claims by U.S. allies, has Fravel consulting with top U.S. government officials.<br />
<br />
<strong>The world's most complicated territory dispute</strong><br />
<br />
Fravel, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program, has been studying China’s policy in the South China Sea for more than a decade, long before China began turning rocks and reefs into islands with airfields. The islands, and the valuable mineral, fishing, and shipping route rights that come with them, are claimed by China and also by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. "The Spratly Islands conflict is the world's most complicated territorial dispute," says Fravel. "There's no other dispute like this in the world."<br />
<br />
The dispute gave rise to Fravel’s doctoral thesis at Stanford University. After reading about China's claims to the Spratly Islands, he decided to examine the occasions when China used force in its territorial disputes. Conventional wisdom held that China had few disputes and that it pursued its claims aggressively. But when he examined Chinese government documents, Fravel found that China has been involved in more than a few disputes —&nbsp;23 since the Communist Party took power in 1949. China settled 17 of them peacefully, and in 15 of those the country compromised on the contested land. "It was a pattern of behavior that I didn't expect to find,” he says.<br />
<br />
Fravel’s thesis became the first book-length systematic study of China's territorial conflicts: "Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes" (Princeton University Press, 2008). "By looking at all of China's disputes and how they varied over time, you can actually bring some scientific rigor to bear on the study of Chinese foreign policy," he says.<br />
<br />
The evolution of China's military strategy since 1949 is the topic of Fravel’s new book: "Active Defense: Explaining the Evolution of China's Military." The research focuses on when, why, and how China pursues major changes in its national military strategy. Fravel has identified nine changes in strategy, three of which were attempts at major overhauls. He’s also found that the People’s Liberation Army commonly behaves like a professional military despite being a heavily politicized creation of the Communist Party —&nbsp;but not during times of political instability.<br />
<br />
<strong>Research on maritime relations</strong> <strong>and nuclear force posture </strong><br />
<br />
Looking ahead, Fravel is planning two research projects. The first is on managing tensions and minimizing the potential for escalation in maritime disputes like the Spratly Islands. The second is on re-examining the history of China’s nuclear weapons program. "The time is right to go back and revisit what we thought we knew about how the program worked and why, and then to also better understand what kind of nuclear force posture China might adopt in the future," he says.<br />
<br />
Fravel joined the MIT faculty in 2004 after a year as a postdoc at Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. He was a fellow with the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program in 2006-2007. In 2010 he was appointed one of the first research associates with the National Asia Research Program. Landing at MIT gave Fravel the opportunity to apply rigorous academic analysis to some of the world’s thorniest security problems.<br />
<br />
"It's the best place to do security studies in the country," he says. "This is one of the few places where you can merge security policy, political science, and international relations."</p>
M. Taylor Fravel, associate professor of Political Science and member of the Security Studies ProgramStuart DarschPolitical science, SHASS, Security studies and military, China, Faculty, Books and authors, International relationsSarah Schwartz SM &#039;15 wins first Obermayer Prize for science writinghttps://news.mit.edu/2015/mit-science-writing-alumna-sarah-schwartz-wins-first-obermayer-prize
MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and Program in Science, Technology, and Society honor Schwartz for her essay on the history of synthetic penicillin.Fri, 04 Dec 2015 16:57:01 -0500Andrew Whitacre | Comparative Media Studies/Writinghttps://news.mit.edu/2015/mit-science-writing-alumna-sarah-schwartz-wins-first-obermayer-prize<p>Sarah Schwartz SM '15 has won the first Obermayer Prize, awarded by MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and its Program in Science, Technology, and Society, for exemplary writing on the history of the process of innovation. Schwartz won the $1,000 prize for her piece, <a href="http://sciwrite.mit.edu/schwartz" target="_blank">“Solving the Impossible Problem: John Clark Sheehan’s Quest for Synthetic Penicillin”</a>, written as part of her work within the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. Schwartz, who graduated in October, is currently a journalist at &lt;i&gt;Science News&lt;/i&gt; in Washington.</p>
<p>Schwartz’s writing is “a clear and engaging account of a story in which persistence — perhaps simple stubbornness — proved to be the key to a major discovery,” said professor of science writing Thomas Levenson, one of the judges for the Obermayer prize and director of the science writing program, who also served as Schwartz’s thesis advisor when she <a href="http://cmsw.mit.edu/human-gene-patents-in-america/" target="_blank">investigated gene patents</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Obermayer Prize was established in 2015 by a generous gift from Arthur Obermayer PhD ’56. The prize offers awards in up to three categories: writing by MIT graduate students and recent alumni aimed at the public; writing for academic audiences by MIT graduate students and recent alumni; and writing in any form by MIT undergraduates.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Obermayer, whose doctorate is in chemistry, is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the former CEO of Moleculon, Inc. He is fascinated by the way innovation occurs and has amassed a significant private collection of archival material documenting the history of innovation, such as work helping understand why it took five years from the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight to the world’s ultimate recognition of their work. Along those lines, Obermayer says the common thread in his collection is to “show why some innovations take so long to be accepted while others receive an immediate opportunity. I want to show what things were like before a given innovation and how it was presented to the world.”</p>
<p>He proposed this prize to encourage the MIT community to think about how innovation takes place, what factors can inhibit or advance that process, and to foster more and better discussion of innovation in the public sphere.</p>
<p>Students submit entries in March, and the prize is awarded each year by a jury composed of a member of MIT’s science writing faculty, one from the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and an alumni representative.</p>
Prize-winner Sarah Schwartz SM '15 is now a journalist at Science News.Science writing, Science journalism, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Awards, honors and fellowships, Alumni/ae, Technology and society, SHASS3 Questions: Anna Frebel on searching for the oldest starshttps://news.mit.edu/2015/3-questions-anna-frebel-searching-oldest-stars-1203
New book details astronomers’ hunt for clues to the early universe.Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500Jennifer Chu | MIT News Officehttps://news.mit.edu/2015/3-questions-anna-frebel-searching-oldest-stars-1203<p><em>Anna Frebel has unearthed some of the oldest stars in the universe, meticulously extricating them from the billions of stellar grains in the sky. By determining the chemical composition of these ancient stars, she hopes to reconstruct a picture of the cosmic environment in the earliest moments of the universe. </em></p>
<p><em>Frebel, the </em><em>Silverman Family Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, is among a new generation of astronomers known as stellar archaeologists — astronomers who search the sky for distant light from ancient stars. In a new book published this month, “Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe,” Frebel chronicles the often-sleepless hunt for stellar artifacts. She spoke with </em>MIT News<em> about the sometimes-risky life of an astronomer, and how light from ancient stars may give new understanding to our modern world. </em></p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> How is the search for ancient stars similar to the work of archaeologists?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> We want to learn about the early era, the first billion years of the universe. By identifying very old stars, we can learn about what the universe was like back then. The nice thing with stars is, they are like old cans of beans in the cupboard — you can open the can at any time, and what’s inside is still good.</p>
<p>Stars preserve the chemical composition of the birth gas cloud from which these stars formed. That is the true archaeological information that we’re excavating. We’re not just finding the stars, but also unearthing what they’re made of, so we can understand what the chemical composition of the early universe was like.</p>
<p>Why is that interesting? Because stars in general make all the chemical elements we know from the periodic table, inside their cores. So everything we know and love, all the matter we’re made of today, had to be cooked up in stars and supernova explosions for billions of years.</p>
<p>By looking for the oldest stars and their composition, we can trace how, for example, elements like carbon and iron, and silver and gold from our jewelry, were all made for the very first time in the very first stars, and how these elements then got incorporated into the interstellar medium and the gas of the early universe, how they got recycled into the next generation of stars — which we can still observe today.</p>
<p>So we go really back to the beginning of what we call chemical evolution. We can piece together how it all began, and that’s the true archaeological endeavor.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> You’ve looked for stars with some of the largest telescopes in the world, including the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. What is the observation experience like in such large, remote facilities?</p>
<p><strong>A: </strong>Observing is really interesting. I really like being right in the middle of it, to take data and immediately look at it and see: Is this something exciting, or should I quickly move on to the next target to have another chance to find something? Once in a while, we know we’ll find something. Sometimes it takes longer.</p>
<p>What does observing mean? We sleep during the day, often closing our eyes just before sunrise, and may sleep until 3 p.m. Then we have to go to the telescope to prepare for the night. Then all the observers from different telescopes come together for dinner in the guesthouse. Then it’s off to the telescopes, where you sit behind all sorts of computer screens and push all sorts of buttons to take one observation after another. It all stops in the morning when it gets too bright, or if it snows, or if there’s fire, or bad clouds, or hail or sleet. And I’ve had it all, including the fire.</p>
<p>When I was a graduate student, I observed at Siding Spring Observatory, which is located in a national park [in Australia]. It was springtime, and the park was doing controlled back burning to prevent wildfires from spreading. But a little bit got out of control, and it moved up the hill, where I was watching from my telescope, and I was all alone. The flames started coming after dinner, at twilight. It sort of curled around the telescope, and went straight to the wooden pole that was carrying all the cables for my telescope.</p>
<p>At midnight I called the observatory fire brigade. I helped roll out the hoses, and hosed the fire down. It was pretty hands-on. But that’s what you do at an observatory. You’re responsible to watch out for the telescope, for the site, for the other people with you on the mountain. It’s amazing that we actually ever get anything done! &nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> In your book, you highlight the major contributions in the field, many of which were made by women. Some of these women were not immediately credited for their discoveries, including the “Harvard Computers.” Who were these women?</p>
<p><strong>A:</strong> When I was at Harvard as a postdoc, I saw all these portraits of ladies in the hallways. They were called the “Harvard Computers,” because Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory around 1900, had fired his male assistant, and instead hired his own housekeeper because, he said, “The male assistants are so lazy, my housekeeper could probably do a better job.”</p>
<p>And actually she did do a better job, and that led him to hire something like a dozen women, although not all at once, and they became famous because they did such fundamental work. They were tasked with cataloging huge amounts of stars and classifying spectra, and doing all sorts of calculations. He initially took all the credit for their work, but it was all too much and too good, what all these ladies did, and the truth prevailed. Now they are world famous for their contributions.</p>
<p>My work kind of goes back to many of the things they did. And I find it really important to remember what has been done before, and what the contributions of women were in science. In my book, it comes through here and there, that I’m just one of those sisters, and that we keep doing what we’re doing, and so will many others after me, I’m sure.</p>
“Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe” (Princeton University Press) by Anna Frebel (pictured)Courtesy of Anna FrebelAstronomy, Astrophysics, Physics, Research, Kavli Institute, space, space, astronomy, and planetary science, Books and authors, Women in STEM, 3 QuestionsReport: How interactive documentaries represent a new form of innovation in digital journalismhttps://news.mit.edu/2015/how-interactive-documentaries-represent-new-form-innovation-digital-journalism-1119
MIT report represents the first thorough mapping of the ongoing convergence between interactive and participatory practices within digital journalism.Thu, 19 Nov 2015 17:34:01 -0500Open Documentary Labhttps://news.mit.edu/2015/how-interactive-documentaries-represent-new-form-innovation-digital-journalism-1119<p>From the advent of the printing press to the emergence of photography, radio, television, and now the Internet and mobile devices, journalists have always found ways to adapt to new technologies by changing the way they tell stories and reach audiences. Interactive and participatory documentaries offer a new opportunity in that development. They provide immersive, visual, and mobile-friendly storytelling techniques; provoke creative collaborations across institutions, "desks" and with publics; and stimulate the use of often overlooked assets such as archives. By so doing, they provide an array of solutions for journalistic institutions that wish to reach a new generation of users and make use of today’s technological developments.</p>
<p>These are the conclusions of a new MIT report — “<a href="http://opendoclab.mit.edu/interactivejournalism" target="_blank">Mapping the Intersection of Two Cultures: Interactive Documentary and Digital Journalism</a>” — released this week by the <a href="http://opendoclab.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT Open Documentary Lab</a> and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.</p>
<p>Drawing from case studies from <em>The New York Times, The Guardian, </em>National Public Radio, <em>Frontline,</em> and others, the report represents the first thorough mapping of the ongoing convergence between interactive and participatory practices within digital journalism.</p>
<p>It “contextualizes and maps the views of the people who are leading change,” write principal investigators William Uricchio, a professor of comparative media studies at MIT, and Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Today's journalism is facing the same fragmented audiences that any other cultural form is facing, and it faces the same fierce competition from 'upstarts,'” Uricchio said. “But our report offers ways of keeping pace, strategies to enhance relevance, and sketches one of many futures for the form.” Leaders featured in these case studies have similar ambitions, concerns, and, to some extent, organizational structures, but they are approaching the challenges of digital journalism with very different strategies, the authors say. These leaders are finding that “reorganizing the production pipeline and means of distribution, listening to and working together with audiences, partnering with other media organizations, and looking to internal assets such as archives” provide the best ways to adapt to the digital age.</p>
<p>Among some of the report’s findings:</p>
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<p>Begin with the user: Thinking about user experience, understanding user behavior, and being in dialogue with the intended public at the beginning of an interactive documentary or other journalistic project is fundamental to reaching and engaging with that public.</p>
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<p>Let story determine form: The story and materials should determine the storytelling techniques employed, and not vice-versa; interactivity and participation provide an expanded toolkit that can enhance clarity, involvement, meaning, and “spreadability,” but they are not “one-size-fits-all” solutions.</p>
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<p>Experiment and learn: Interactive and participatory documentaries can provide “research and development” opportunities for journalism organizations, which may then adapt relevant tools, techniques, and experiences for their future work.</p>
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<p>Collaborate across borders: In an era when word, sound, and image flow together into one digital stream, media institutions fare better when they partner with like-valued organizations, form interdisciplinary teams, and co-create with their publics.</p>
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<p>Shape conversations: Interactivity and user participation can enable and inform the connection between audiences and sources, helping journalism to shape conversations in addition to defining truths.</p>
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<p>Use archives creatively: Legacy journalism organizations can make much better use of a defining asset — their archives — to build deep, interactive story environments, distinguishing their voices in a crowded news environment and empowering their users to explore how events and their coverage take shape.</p>
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<p>Consider long-term impact: A cost-benefit analysis of interactive and participatory storytelling in journalism settings should include not only audience reach and impact, but also organizational innovation in the form of new teams, processes, and tools that can be integrated into other parts of the newsroom.</p>
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<p>The authors conclude with the reminder that although the industry faces multiple pressures, it is also reaching new levels of excellence and impact, due in large part to the experiments and success outlined in these case studies. They argue that their insights provide “a scalable set of blueprints (and warnings) for organizations of all sizes.”</p>
<p>Other authors for “Mapping the Intersection of Two Cultures” are Comparative Media Studies/Writing graduate students Lily Bui, Sean Flynn, and Deniz Tortum.</p>
Humanities, Journalism, SHASS, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Research, Technology and society, Visual arts, Media, Digital humanities, Film and Television